The Farewell Sermon of the Prophet Muhammad

A look at the farewell sermon in Islamic teaching, drawn from the Quran and authentic hadith.

Standing before more than a hundred thousand Muslims gathered for what would be his final pilgrimage, the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ delivered an address on the plain of Arafah that scholars treat as a deliberate summary of his entire mission – a closing statement of Islamic ethics and law delivered just months before his death in 632 CE.

The Farewell Sermon: Sanctity of Life, Property, and Honor

Preserved across multiple chains of hadith transmission, the sermon opens by declaring the blood, property, and honor of every Muslim as sacred, comparing their inviolability to the sanctity of that very day and that very city – a comparison scholars note was chosen because pilgrims already understood these as the most protected day and place they knew, making the analogy immediately clear to everyone present.

The End of Pre-Islamic Blood Feuds and Interest

The address explicitly canceled the blood feuds and unpaid interest debts of the pre-Islamic period, starting, according to the accounts, with obligations owed to his own family, so that no one could later claim he had exempted his own relatives while binding everyone else. Scholars point to this detail as a deliberate demonstration that the new legal order applied to the Prophet ﷺ and his own household first, not as an exception carved out for those closest to him.

Rights of Women

The sermon addressed the treatment of wives directly, instructing the gathered men to fear Allah regarding women, since they had been taken as a trust under Allah’s word, and that they had rights over their husbands just as their husbands had rights over them. This instruction, delivered before such a large gathering at the close of his life, is cited by scholars as a deliberate, public reaffirmation of a theme already present throughout the Quran and his own teaching career.

“No Arab Has Superiority Over a Non-Arab”

One of the sermon’s most frequently quoted lines declares that no Arab has superiority over a non-Arab, nor a non-Arab over an Arab, nor a white person over a black person, nor a black person over a white person, except by piety and good conduct – a statement scholars treat as a direct rejection of the tribal and racial hierarchies that had structured pre-Islamic Arabian society, delivered in the most public setting available to him.

“I Have Left Among You That Which, if You Hold Fast to It…”

The Prophet ﷺ closed by telling the assembled crowd that he had left among them something that, if held onto firmly, would keep them from ever going astray – the Book of Allah, with some narrations adding his own sunnah alongside it – before repeatedly asking the crowd whether he had conveyed the message, and instructing those present, upon their confirmation, to convey what they had heard to those who were absent, since a person who received the message secondhand might understand it even better than one who had heard it directly. Scholars cite this closing instruction as the explicit reason the sermon was preserved and transmitted so widely afterward, treated by the earliest generation of Muslims as a direct personal charge to pass it on rather than let it fade with those who happened to be present that day.

The Quranic Verse Revealed During the Sermon

Classical scholarship connects the occasion of the Farewell Sermon to the revelation of a specific verse of Surah al-Ma’idah, describing it as revealed to the Prophet ﷺ while he stood at Arafah delivering the address: “This day I have perfected for you your religion and completed My favor upon you and have approved for you Islam as religion” (5:3). Umar ibn al-Khattab (RA) is reported to have wept upon hearing this verse recited, explaining when asked that after completion, only decline can follow – a response scholars have read as an early recognition that the sermon marked not merely the conclusion of one pilgrimage, but the practical close of the Prophet’s ﷺ mission on earth, with the specific ethical and legal instructions delivered that day serving afterward as one of the primary summaries scholars return to when describing Islam’s core teachings, precisely because it was delivered as a deliberate final address rather than one lesson among many spread across the more than two decades of his prophethood.

Readers interested in this subject may also want to read about Haya: Modesty in Islamic Teaching. The verses and hadith cited above can be cross-referenced in full at Quran.com.