Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas

Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas (born c. 595 CE in Mecca — a traditional estimate, not an attested date) was one of the earliest followers of the Prophet Muhammad and a leading military commander of the early conquests. He belonged to the Banu Zuhra clan of Quraysh — the clan of the Prophet's mother — and tradition counts him among the first handful of free men to accept Islam, reportedly while still a youth (sources differ on the order and on whether he was 17 or 19). In the Sunni tradition he is remembered as one of the ten Companions whom the Prophet is reported to have promised paradise (al-'ashara al-mubashshara), a report of the genre known as manaqib (virtue reports); this is a position held within Sunni piety rather than an established historical fact.

Sira and hadith sources credit him with fighting at Badr (624) and Uhud (625), and he was renowned as an archer. His best-attested achievement is military: in c. 636 he commanded the Muslim army at al-Qadisiyya against the Sasanian Persians, a decisive battle that opened Iraq to Arab rule; the report that he directed part of the fighting while ill is a traditional detail. He then oversaw the founding of the garrison city of Kufa and governed it under the caliph Umar, who later removed him (c. 642) after complaints — though, the reports say, without finding him guilty of wrongdoing. He was also one of the six-member shura that Umar appointed to choose his successor.

During the first civil war (fitna) after Uthman's killing, Sa'd is reported to have taken a stance of neutrality, declining to fight on any side — a choice noted in both Sunni and Shia sources, which evaluate his standing differently. He withdrew to an estate at al-'Aqiq, a valley near Medina, and died there. The date is genuinely disputed in the classical sources: traditionally 55 AH (c. 674 CE), with variants of 54 and 58 AH and his age given as 58, 74, or 83. According to the traditional reports his body was carried into Medina, where he was buried in the Baqi' cemetery; he is described as the last of the "ten" to die.