Zayd ibn Amr

Zayd ibn Amr, a Meccan who rejected his people's idols and sought "the religion of Abraham". He died just before the revelation, in what the tradition describes as a near arrival that never reached its goal.

The biography says that Zayd, of Banu Adi, stood at a Quraysh feast and refused what had been slaughtered in the names of the gods: "I do not eat of what you slaughter for their names." He sought pure monotheism in Syria and beyond, and rejected Judaism and Christianity as he found them. His people drove him out of Mecca to the mountain passes above it ¹.

He died years before the first revelation. In one account, highwaymen killed him near al-Ta'if ¹. The tradition relates that when the Prophet was asked about him afterwards, he replied that Zayd would be raised on the Day of Resurrection as a community on his own ².

Zayd is a window onto the hanifs, the few monotheists of the pre-Islamic age whom the sources preserve. He is evidence that the question Islam answered was already being asked in Mecca before it came.

The Sealed Nectar, citing Muhammad al-Ghazali, reports that when news of the secret call reached Quraysh, they gave it little attention. Perhaps they counted Muhammad among the theologians who speak about divinity and its rights, as Umayya ibn Abi al-Salt, Qass ibn Sa'ida, Amr ibn Nufayl and their like did ^{3 4}.

• In al-Ghazali's text the name reads "Amr ibn Nufayl". The museum has read it as Zayd ibn Amr ibn Nufayl, as its own judgement. The name as it appears in the source is given above.