QMI-INS-000b · Early 1st c. AH
Inscription of ʿAbdallāh ibn ʿAlqamah
نقش عبد الله بن علقمة
Darb Ḥismā, north-western Arabia
- بسمك اللهم
- انا عبدالله بن علقمة
- اوصي ببر الله والرحم لـ
- [..] عه لديك؟
In Your name, O God. I am ʿAbdallāh ibn ʿAlqamah. I enjoin dutifulness to God and to kin (al-raḥim) … […] with You (?)
A short text that opens with the old Meccan formula bismika Allāhumma , “in Your name, O God”, and then gives the writer’s bequest, “I enjoin dutifulness to God and to kin”. The opening is the one Suhayl ibn ʿAmr asked to be written at al-Ḥudaybiyah in place of the basmala, and it is usually taken as a sign of pre-Islamic date (compare QMI-PRE-002 ). The bequest, however, is the Islamic formula of the early rock inscriptions, found for example in the text of Shurayḥ dated 43 AH ( QMI-INS-006 ).
The Desert Team identify the writer as ʿAbdallāh ibn ʿAlqamah ibn al-Muṭṭalib ibn ʿAbd Manāf, Abū Nabiqah, a Qurashī of Banū l-Muṭṭalib who accepted Islam late and to whom, according to al-Ṭabarī, the Prophet assigned fifty wasq from the produce of Khaybar. On that identification the writer is a mukhaḍram , a man who lived in both periods and kept the opening he had learned before Islam. The team draw the wider conclusion that a text opening with bismika Allāhumma is not necessarily pre-Islamic, and that each must be judged by its context.
The text is undated. The early letter forms and the identification of the writer place it in the first decades of Islam; the date given here is an estimate. The fourth line is uncertain and, in the team’s view, may have been added by a different hand.
Source: Desert Team (Farīq al-Ṣaḥrāʾ), “Nuqūsh wa-ḥikāyāt min zaman al-ṣaḥābah wa-l-tābiʿīn”, alsahra.org, 4 June 2025, no. 1. Reading by ʿAbdallāh ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Saʿīd.