Tamim al-Dari (RA) was a Companion of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ from the Banu al-Dar of Lakhm, a people of the Bayt Jibrin country between the coastal plain and…
Tamim al-Dari (RA) was a Companion of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ from the Banu al-Dar of Lakhm, a people of the Bayt Jibrin country between the coastal plain and the hills of al-Khalil. He came to Madinah with a delegation of his clan and accepted Islam, and it is here, in the land he came from, that he was buried. A Companion of the Prophet ﷺ He is remembered in Madinah for lighting the Prophet's Mosque with oil lamps, a small act that entered the memory of the community and is still recalled when his name is mentioned. He is also the narrator of the account of al-Jassasa, the sea-voyage report concerning the Dajjal which the Prophet ﷺ affirmed before the people from the minbar. Sayyidah Fatimah bint Qays (RA) related that the Prophet ﷺ gathered the people and said: "By Allah, I have not made you assemble for exhortation or for a warning, but I have detained you here, for Tamim Dari, a Christian, who came and accepted Islam, told me something, which agrees with what I was telling you about the Dajjal." Tamim al-Dari (RA) had sailed with thirty men of Bani Lakhm and Bani Judham, been driven a month by the waves, and come ashore on an island where a beast that named itself al-Jassasa sent them to a shackled man in a monastery. The man questioned them about the date-palms of Baysan, the lake of Tabariyya and the spring of Zughar, and about the unlettered Prophet, then told them he was the Dajjal. The Prophet ﷺ struck the minbar with the end of his staff and said this meant Taybah — Madinah. The narration is recorded in Sahih Muslim 2942 , and through it the name of Tamim al-Dari (RA) became attached to one of the best known eschatological reports in Islam. The grant over the hills of al-Khalil Before the Prophet ﷺ passed away, Tamim al-Dari (RA) was granted the district of al-Khalil and Bayt Aynun, the deed written out by Sayyiduna Ali (RA). The land was still under Byzantine rule at the time; the grant took effect only when Palestine came into Muslim hands in 634. His family held those estates for generations afterwards. The Egyptian historian Ibn Lahi'a, writing in the eighth century, records that the descendants of Tamim al-Dari (RA) still held the lands of al-Khalil and Bayt Aynun in his own day, and later jurists, including al-Ghazali and al-Suyuti, wrote in defence of the family's claim when it was disputed. Bayt Jibrin Tradition places his death in 40 AH and his burial at Bayt Jibrin, and the maqam honoured as his grave stands in that locality today. The place was a road-town of the Shephelah, known in Roman and Byzantine times as Eleutheropolis, and it remained a settlement of consequence through the Islamic centuries until 1948.