AD 628

Muhammad’s letters to the heads of state

Traditional dispatch of Muhammad’s letters to neighboring rulers

One traditional report says Khosrow II read Muhammad’s letter and tore it into pieces.

Six messengers, in a later narrative

A later Islamic narrative collected by Ibn Sa‘d says that, after al-Hudaybiyya in 628, Muhammad dispatched six messengers to rulers or courts associated with Abyssinia, Byzantium, Persia, Egypt, Ghassan and Yamama, summoning their recipients to Islam.

“World leaders” is anachronistic shorthand: the traditional recipients ranged from two emperors to regional rulers and Arabian chiefs, and Hawdha ibn Ali in Yamama was inside Arabia.

The principal narratives were written down generations later.

What the reported letters say

Sahih al-Bukhari preserves a reported letter to Heraclius that identifies the sender as Muhammad, invites him to embrace Islam and cites Qur’an 3:64 — a brief conversion summons, not a digest of doctrine.

Another Bukhari report says Abdullah ibn Hudhafa carried a letter through the governor of Bahrain to Khosrow II, who tore it up.

A report’s presence in a canonical hadith collection establishes its importance in Islamic tradition, but not Byzantine or Sasanian corroboration.

The package does not hold together

W. Montgomery Watt concluded that the packaged story cannot be accepted as it stands: he dated Dihya’s journey toward Bostra to summer 627, and argued that the Muqawqis mission also appears to predate al-Hudaybiyya.

Nadia Maria El-Cheikh treats the developed Heraclius narrative as Islamic image-building that helped legitimate Muhammad’s prophetic mission and the early Muslim state, rather than independent Byzantine confirmation of the audience and its response.

There is no secure evidence that all six missions occurred on one day, or even in one year.

Sources

Researched 23 Aug 2026 5 sources not yet audited Date disputed

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet and rewritten from that sheet. This article has not yet had an independent model audit. How the pipeline works →

Date disputed. Sources disagree; the research places it at ~0628.

What the sources leave uncertain

There is no secure evidence that all six missions occurred on one day or even in one year.
The principal narratives were written down generations later. Bukhari preserves the reports as hadith, not contemporary imperial archives.
Scholars differ: some accept a historical core of diplomatic contact, while Watt rejected the coordinated conversion-summons narrative as it stands and reassigned some missions to dates before Hudaybiyya.
The physical objects sometimes exhibited as Muhammad’s original letters do not by themselves authenticate the traditional 628 dispatch narrative.