Ṭalaʿa l-badru ʿalaynā

The doubts about the chain

Ibn Ḥajar (d. 852/1449), Fatḥ al-Bārī (ed. Dār al-Maʿrifa, 7:261–262), after quoting the verses from al-Khilaʿī through Ibn ʿĀʾisha as a cut report (منقطع), adds: “and it is a معضل chain”, that is, one with two or more links missing, “and perhaps that was at his return from Tabūk.” In the chapter on Tabūk (8:129) he says again that the report is by a cut chain, and that some say it was at the Hijra and some at Tabūk.

al-ʿIrāqī (d. 806/1404), in al-Mughnī ʿan ḥaml al-asfār, his sourcing of the Iḥyāʾ (Dār Ibn Ḥazm printing, vol. 1, p. 749), says al-Bayhaqī gave it in the Dalāʾil as معضل, and that it says nothing of the tambourine or the melodies that al-Ghazālī adds. The printed line names ʿĀʾisha, not Ibn ʿĀʾisha as the Dalāʾil has it. His son Walī al-Dīn, in Ṭarḥ al-tathrīb (7:239), quotes his father’s commentary on al-Tirmidhī: Ibn ʿĀʾisha’s words are معضل and “no proof stands on them”.

al-Albānī (d. 1420/1999) grades it weak in the Silsilat al-aḥādīth al-ḍaʿīfa (no. 598, in the scan we opened). He says its men are trustworthy, but three or more narrators are missing, since Ibn ʿĀʾisha, a teacher of Aḥmad, gives it as a bare report, and that this is why al-ʿIrāqī faulted it. He adds that the story as a whole is not established, and that al-Ghazālī’s “with tambourine and melodies” has no basis. He also holds that even if the story were sound, it would not be proof for the nashīds recited today. We report his view; we make no ruling on the singing of them.

When was it sung: the Hijra, Tabūk, or Mecca?

The pass of al-Wadāʿ is the place the people of Madina went out to see off a traveller. It is where the Bukhārī report of al-Sāʾib ibn Yazīd has him meet the Prophet as a boy, returning from Tabūk (al-Bayhaqī quotes it, 5:265). The verses are not in that report, nor in Anas’s Bukhārī report of the Hijra, where the people cry “Muḥammad has come”.

al-Bayhaqī himself, at 5:266, says that “our scholars” mention the verses at his arrival at Madina from Mecca, and not at his return from Tabūk, “and God knows best”, and he gives them here as well. His own words leave it open. Ibn al-Qayyim (d. 751/1350), Zād al-maʿād (3:481–482) puts them at the return from Tabūk. He calls the claim that they were sung on the arrival from Mecca a plain mistake, because the passes of al-Wadāʿ lie on the Syrian side of Madina: a traveller from Mecca does not see them and passes them only on the way to Syria. Ibn Ḥajar and Walī al-Dīn al-ʿIrāqī lean the same way. In Ṭarḥ al-tathrīb the other view is set out too: al-Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ takes the verses as proof that the name is old, and Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr thinks the passes were on the road to Mecca; Walī al-Dīn answers that the Bukhārī report puts them on the Syrian side.

Ibn Ḥajar also writes that a pass can lie toward the Hijāz and still be where one leaves for Syria, as one enters Mecca by one pass and leaves by another, and that the two roads join. So the geography does not settle it, and neither does the chain. The report itself does not say when.

A third setting is in the dictionary Ibn Manẓūr (d. 711/1311), Lisān al-ʿArab (s.v. ودع, Dār Ṣādir, 8:387). It says that al-Wadāʿ is a valley at Mecca, that the pass of al-Wadāʿ takes its name from it, and that when the Prophet entered Mecca on the day of its conquest the slave women of Mecca met him clapping and singing these two verses. It gives no chain for this. So there are three settings in the books we opened: the Hijra, the return from Tabūk, and the conquest of Mecca. Historians still differ over the first two, and we do not decide between any of them.

Also known as: Tala'al Badru 'Alayna · Tala al-Badru Alayna · Thaniyyāt al-Wadāʿ · Talaal Badru Alayna · طلع البدر علينا · ثنيات الوداع.

This edition

We read the verses in OpenITI release v2025.1.9, texts from Shamela (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0), around the lines: al-Bayhaqī’s Dalāʾil in two printings (Shamela 0007478, 0013115), al-Khilaʿī’s Fawāʾid (0010835, a manuscript text), Ibn al-Qayyim’s Zād al-maʿād (0021713), Ibn Ḥajar’s Fatḥ al-Bārī (JK000166), al-ʿIrāqī’s Mughnī and Ṭarḥ al-tathrīb, al-Albānī’s Silsila from an archive.org scan, and Ibn Manẓūr’s Lisān al-ʿArab (Shamela 0001687, OpenITI 0725AH repository). These are digital texts, not page images, and the page numbers above are those the texts mark; we have not checked them against a paper copy, and where a text marks a page break inside a sentence the number is the page the verses fall on. No manuscript of al-Bayhaqī was read.

The wording agrees in all of them, apart from «ثنية» (singular, in Ibn Ḥajar’s quotation) and «داعي» (Ibn al-Qayyim); the notes say so. The Arabic of Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr, ʿIyāḍ and Ibn Ḥajar’s earlier source we know only as these books quote them.

✦AI The English and the notes are AI, and no person has reviewed them.

✦AI The vowelling and Latin reading are AI, made by the grammar from the unvowelled sources. No vowelled print was compared.

Word analysis (tap a word): roots, patterns and grammar from CAMeL Tools and, for Qurʾān lines, the Quranic Arabic Corpus. Corrections were checked against Lisān al-ʿArab and other opened sources, with AI assistance, and await a reader's review; most words have not been checked by a person.