Sahaba

In Islam, the Ṣaḥābah (Arabic: الصحابة‎) "Companions" were the companions of the Islamic prophet Muḥammad. This form is plural; the singular is masculine sahābiyy, feminine sahābiyyah. A list of the best-known companions can be found in the List of sahābah.

Definitions of "Companion"
Most Sunnis regard anyone who, in the state of faith, saw Muhammad to be a sahābiyy[1]. Lists of prominent companions usually run to fifty or sixty names, being the people most closely associated with Muhammad. However, there were clearly many others who had some contact with Muhammad, and their names and biographies were recorded in religious reference texts such as Muḥammad ibn Sa'd's early Kitāb at-Tabāqat al-Kabīr.

Muhammad bin Ahmad Efendi (death 1622), who is also known with the sobriquet "Nişancızâde", the author of the book entitled Mir’ât-i-kâinât (in Turkish), states as follows: "Once a male or female Muslim has seen Hadrat Muhammad only for a short time, no matter whether he/she is a child or an adult, he/she is called a Sahaba with the proviso of dying with as a believer; the same rule applies to blind Muslims who have talked with the Prophet at least once. If a disbeliever sees the Prophet and then joins the Believers after the demise of Muhammad, he is not a Sahaba; nor is a person called a Sahaba if he converted to Islam afterwards although he had seen the Prophet Muhammad as a Muslim. A person who converts to Islam after being a Sahaba and then becomes a Believer again after the demise of Prophet Muhammad, is a Sahaba."

It was important to identify the companions because later scholars accepted their testimony (the hadith, or traditions) as to the words and deeds of Muhammad, the occasions on which the Qur'an was revealed, and various important matters of Islamic history and practice (sunnah). The testimony of the companions, as it was passed down through chains of trusted narrators (isnads), was the basis of the developing Islamic tradition.


Other links in the Chain of Isnad
Because the hadith were not written down until many years after the death of Muhammad, the isnads, or chains of transmission, always have several links. The first link is preferably a companion, who had direct contact with Muhammad. The companion then related the tradition to a tābi‘īn, the companion of the companion. Tābi‘īn had no direct contact with Muhammad, but did have direct contact with the sahāba. The tradition then would have been passed from the Tābi‘īn to the Tābi‘ at-Tābi‘īn, the third link.

The second and third links in the chain of transmission were also of great interest to Muslim scholars, who treated of them in biographical dictionaries and evaluated them for bias and reliability. Shi'a and Sunni apply different metrics.


Numbers of companions
Some Muslims assert that there were more than two hundred thousand companions. One hundred twenty four thousand are believed to have witnessed the last sermon Muhammad delivered after making his last pilgrimage, or Hajj, to Mecca.

The book entitled Istî’âb fî ma’rifat-il-Ashâb by Hafidh Yusuf bin Muhammad bin Qurtubi (death 1071) consists of two thousand and seven hundred and seventy biographies of male Sahaba and three hundred and eighty-one biographies of female Sahaba. According to an observation in the book entitled Mawâhib-i-ladunniyya, an untold number of persons had already converted to Islam by the time Muhammad died. There were ten thousand Sahaba by the time Mecca was conquered and seventy thousand Sahaba during the Battle of Tabuk in 630.