QMI-INS-055ak · 1st c. AH
Inscription of Najrān: “May God Forgive the Muslims”
نقش نجران: يغفر الله للمسلمين
Najrān region, Saudi Arabia
- بسم الله يغفر الله
- للمسلمين آمين رب العالمين
In the name of God. May God forgive the Muslims. Āmīn, Lord of the Worlds.
A two-line prayer from the Najrān region, cut on a dark rock face among older drawings of camels, ostriches and riders. The writer gives no name. He opens with the short basmalah , bi-smi llāh , and asks forgiveness not for himself or for a named person but for “the Muslims” as a whole, closing with āmīn rabb al-ʿālamīn . The letter forms are those of the early Ḥijāzī hand, upright and undotted, with a long flat baseline, and on that ground the text belongs to the first century AH; it carries no date.
The interest of the text lies in its one collective word. In the dated inscriptions of this catalog the community is rarely named at all. The writers pray for themselves, for a patron or a kinsman, and the believers appear in the titles of the caliph, amīr al-muʾminīn . The plural al-muslimūn as the name of the community is late and rare on stone: a text of Wādī al-Gharra of 107 AH professes faith in “the Lord of the Muslims” ( rabb al-muslimīn ) while rejecting Wadd and Hubal, and the inscription of ʿAnjar of 123 AH asks blessing “upon all the Muslims” ( ʿalā ʿāmmat al-muslimīn ) ( QMI-INS-055g , QMI-INS-055l ). The name of the religion itself, al-islām , is rarer still outside quotations of the Qurʾān: at Jabal Usays in 119 AH a man named Ḥafṣ declares “my Lord is God and my religion is Islam” ( rabbī Allāh wa-dīnī al-islām ) ( QMI-INS-055kb ). Together the two texts show the community and its faith being named by ordinary writers, not only in official formulae. Prayers that reach beyond the writer are found in a few other texts, for “the people of Taymāʾ all together” in 108 AH and for whoever reads the stone and says āmīn in 119 AH ( QMI-INS-055e , QMI-INS-055ka ).
The name is also attested outside the stones, in the opening of the Constitution of Medina ( Ṣaḥīfat al-Madīnah ): «هذا كتاب من محمد النبي بين المؤمنين والمسلمين من قريش ويثرب» , “between the believers and the Muslims of Quraysh and Yathrib” (Ibn Hishām, after Ibn Isḥāq). Though it survives only in later sources, most scholars accept the document as authentic and date it to the first years after the hijrah, c. 1–2 AH (622–624 CE) (M. Lecker, The “Constitution of Medina” , Princeton 2004). The word is thus in use long before 107 AH, its earliest occurrence among the dated inscriptions of this catalog ( QMI-INS-055g ).
The script places the text in the first century, but it cannot be dated more closely. The nearest hand in the catalog is the second inscription of Yazīd ibn ʿAbdallāh al-Sulūlī, also from the Najrān region and placed at about 29 AH: both are pecked broadly into the dark patina, with tall straight alif s and lām s and the same small closed hāʾ , though the present text is more regular and draws its letters out further along the line ( QMI-INS-003b ). The wording, on the other hand, finds its dated parallels later in the century: the closing āmīn rabb al-ʿālamīn does not occur in the dated inscriptions of this catalog before 64 AH (Ḥafnat al-Abyaḍ, QMI-INS-010 ), and prayers made for a whole community, and the word al-muslimūn itself, belong in the dated texts to the late first and early second century. The text is short, and neither line of evidence is decisive, so it is dated here only to the first century AH. Whatever its exact decade, it is an early witness to the collective use of al-muslimūn as the name of a community for which one prays. A dated prayer of 123 AH from the same region, for Khālid ibn Ghannām, extends the Najrān series to the end of the Umayyad period ( QMI-INS-055la ).
Source: Published by Mashʿal ibn ʿAbdallāh, 13 June 2026, Najrān region. Reading as supplied for the catalog.