Hazrat Amir Muawiya

The heading is a statement of affection rather than an argument, Hazrat Amir Muʿāwiyah is the light of our eyes, and the piece then makes the argument underneath it, in thirteen hadiths, signed from Manchester.

The claims it sets out to establish are listed on the first page, before any evidence:

• He was a scribe of the revelation.
• He was the Prophet’s own brother-in-law, and dear to him.
• He was a Companion, indeed a Companion of high standing.
• The Prophet ﷺ made particular supplication for him, for the opening of lands to him and for his steadfastness.

The last point is the one the piece is really for, and it is a correction rather than a praise. It says that Muʿāwiyah’s demand of Ḥaḍrat ʿAlī was not merely that the killers of ʿUthmān be punished. The real demand, as he puts it, was that the mischievous faction had Madīnah Ṭayyibah surrounded, that it had become hard for any Companion of the Messenger to live there, and that Madīnah should therefore be cleared of those gangs so that the Companions, and Ḥaḍrat ʿĀʾishah, could live in it at ease.

That is a claim about what a dispute was about, and he rests it on the hadiths rather than on the later histories, which is the same method as everything else on this shelf.