The Farewell Sermon of the Prophet Muhammad

On the 9th of Dhul Hijjah, 10 AH, somewhere between 100,000 and 144,000 Muslims stood on the plain of Arafah for what would turn out to be the Prophet’s ﷺ only and final pilgrimage. The crowd was too large for his voice to reach on its own, so he had a young companion, Rabi’ah ibn Umayyah, stand near his camel and call out each line after him, sentence by sentence, so the address could travel back through the crowd. What Rabi’ah relayed that day is treated by scholars as a deliberate summary of the Prophet’s ﷺ entire mission – a closing statement of Islamic ethics and law delivered only months before his death.

Blood, Property, and Honor Made Sacred

Preserved across multiple chains of transmission, the sermon opens by declaring the blood, property, and honor of every Muslim sacred, comparing their inviolability to the sanctity of that very day and that very city. Scholars note the comparison was chosen deliberately – pilgrims already understood the sanctity of that day and place better than any abstract legal language could have conveyed, which made the analogy land instantly with everyone present.

Canceling His Own Family’s Debts First

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

Rights Owed to Women

The sermon addressed the treatment of wives directly, instructing the men gathered to fear Allah regarding women, since they had been taken as a trust under Allah’s word, and that they held rights over their husbands just as their husbands held rights over them. Delivered before such a large gathering at the close of his life, scholars read this as a deliberate, public reaffirmation of a theme already present throughout the Quran and his teaching over the preceding two decades.

“Except by Piety and Good Conduct”

One of the sermon’s most 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. Scholars treat it 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, to the largest audience he would ever address at once.

“Convey This to Those Who Are Absent”

The Prophet ﷺ closed by telling the crowd 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 asking repeatedly whether he had conveyed the message. On their confirmation, he instructed those present to pass on what they had heard to those who were absent, adding that someone receiving the message secondhand might understand it even better than someone who heard it directly. Scholars cite this closing instruction as the specific reason the sermon was transmitted so widely afterward – treated by the earliest generation of Muslims as a direct personal charge to carry it forward, not something that was simply supposed to fade with whoever happened to be standing there that day.

The Verse Revealed While He Was Still Speaking

Classical scholarship connects 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 on hearing it recited, explaining when asked that after completion, only decline can follow. Scholars have read that reaction as an early recognition that the sermon marked not just the close of one pilgrimage but the practical close of the Prophet’s ﷺ mission on earth – which is part of why its specific ethical and legal instructions are still one of the places scholars return to first when summarizing Islam’s core teachings: it was delivered as a deliberate final address, not one lesson folded in among the many spread across more than two decades of his prophethood.

Readers interested in this period may also want to read about Haya: Modesty in Islamic Teaching, a value the sermon itself leans on without naming directly.