جوار مطعم بن عدي

When the Prophet ﷺ returned from Taif in the tenth year of prophethood — beaten, bleeding, having been driven from the city he had hoped would shelter his mission — he faced a practical crisis: he could not re-enter Mecca without tribal protection. Arabian custom required that a man entering a city have a protector from among its leadership, or he could be attacked without consequence. Abu Talib was dead. The Prophet ﷺ approached three of Mecca's most prominent chiefs in sequence and was refused by each. Mut'im ibn Adi of the Banu Nawfal agreed. He had been among those who had torn up the economic boycott against the Banu Hashim years earlier — he was not a hostile man, and he had standing. He armed his sons and nephews, took them to the mosque, and announced publicly that the Prophet ﷺ was under his protection. The Prophet ﷺ entered Mecca, circumambulated the Kaaba, and the Quraysh who saw him asked Mut'im whether he had followed Muhammad or was protecting him. 'Protecting him,' said Mut'im. They left the Prophet ﷺ alone. Mut'im was a polytheist and died before the Battle of Badr, never having accepted Islam. At Badr, when the Prophet ﷺ had taken Qurayshi captives and the question of their fate arose, he said: 'If Mut'im ibn Adi were alive and had interceded for these people, I would have released them all for his sake.' The statement — the full Badr captives released for the sake of one polytheist's memory — was one of the most striking acknowledgments of a non-Muslim's good deed in the entire seerah. The protection that made possible the Prophet's ﷺ return to Mecca, his continued mission, and ultimately the Hijra was given by a man who never became Muslim, honored in perpetuity by the Prophet ﷺ who never forgot it. The Prophet's ﷺ gratitude to Mut'im — expressed at Badr, years after the protection, for a man who had died a polytheist — established the principle that good deeds toward the Muslim community carry weight before Allah regardless of the faith of the person who performed them, and that the Prophet ﷺ himself never forgot those who had helped him.