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Ḥassān ibn Thābit (d. ca. 54/674) was a companion of the Prophet Muḥammad ﷺ from the Anṣār of Madīnah, and the most celebrated of the poets who placed their art at the service of Islam.¹ Already a poet of standing in the years before the Hijra, he became after his conversion the foremost defender of the Prophet ﷺ in verse, answering the satires of the Quraysh and singing the praises of the new community. For this service he earned the enduring title of “poet of the Messenger of God,” and his dīwān preserves some of the earliest poetry composed in the cause of the faith.

Ḥassān belonged to the Banū al-Najjār, a clan of the Khazraj of Madīnah, and was born and raised in the city in the decades before the coming of Islam. He had already won fame as a poet in the Jāhiliyyah, frequenting the court of the Ghassānid kings to the north and the chiefs of his own people, and composing in praise and in satire after the manner of the Arab poets of his age. His long life is reflected in the tradition that he lived sixty years before Islam and sixty within it, attaining a great age.

Ḥassān outlived the Prophet ﷺ by many years, surviving into the caliphate of ʻAlī and Muʻāwiya. In the discords that divided the community after the death of ʻUthmān he is said to have held back from partisanship, and the latter part of his life was passed in Madīnah, where he had lost his sight in old age. The sources place his death in the city at an advanced age, with reports giving the year variously around 54/674.

## References

1 W. ʻArafat, “Ḥassān b. Thābit,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., ed. P. Bearman et al. (Leiden: Brill, 1971), 3:271–73. 2 Abū ʻAbd Allāh al-Bukhārī, Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, “Kitāb badʼ al-khalq,” bāb dhikr al-malāʼika, no. 3212. 3 Abū al-Ḥusayn Muslim ibn al-Ḥajjāj, Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, “Kitāb faḍāʼil al-ṣaḥāba,” bāb faḍāʼil Ḥassān, no. 2490. 4 Ḥassān ibn Thābit, Dīwān, ed. Walid ʻArafat (London: Luzac, 1971), 1:15–29. 5 Ibn Hishām, al-Sīra al-nabawiyya, trans. Alfred Guillaume as The Life of Muhammad (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), 624–27. 6 Ibn Saʻd, Kitāb al-ṭabaqāt al-kabīr (Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, 1968), 4:393–95. 7 Al-Dhahabī, Siyar aʻlām al-nubalāʼ (Beirut: Muʼassasat al-Risāla, 1985), 2:512–23. 8 Abū ʻĪsá al-Tirmidhī, Sunan al-Tirmidhī, “Kitāb al-adab,” bāb mā jāʼa fī inshād al-shiʻr, no. 2846.