The Farewell Pilgrimage and Sermon

In the year 10 AH, corresponding to 632 CE, Muhammad led what became known as his only complete Hajj pilgrimage as a Muslim, and, according to Islamic tradition, his final one, since he died several months later. During the pilgrimage, gathered with a very large crowd of followers on the plain of Arafat, a central location and rite of the Hajj, Muhammad delivered an extended address remembered in Islamic tradition as the Farewell Sermon, Khutbat al-Wada.

The sermon, preserved in various versions across the hadith literature with some differences in wording and emphasis between accounts, addressed a wide range of ethical and legal principles: the sanctity of life, property and honor among believers, the abolition of pre-Islamic blood feuds and interest-based debts accumulated before Islam, instructions regarding the fair treatment of women, and a declaration of the equality of all believers regardless of race or ethnic origin, phrased in terms emphasizing that no one has superiority over another except through piety and good conduct.

Muhammad is also reported to have asked the assembled crowd whether he had conveyed his message, and, receiving confirmation that he had, to have called on those present to witness that he had fulfilled his mission, a moment Islamic tradition treats as marking the completion of his prophetic responsibility to his community.

The Farewell Sermon occupies a distinctive place in Islamic tradition as a summary statement of core ethical and legal principles delivered directly by Muhammad near the end of his life, and its various clauses are frequently cited in later Islamic legal and ethical discourse as foundational articulations of principles including racial equality, the prohibition of usury, and protections for women within the framework of the period, cited by later scholars and, in the modern era, by Muslim commentators addressing contemporary social and legal questions.

Because the sermon survives through multiple hadith transmissions rather than a single fixed contemporary text, scholars of Islamic history note some variation in the specific wording and even the exact content emphasized across different early sources, a common feature of hadith transmission generally, though the core themes, the sanctity of life and property, equality among believers, and fair treatment of women, appear consistently across the major versions.

The Farewell Pilgrimage as a whole, beyond the sermon itself, is treated in Islamic jurisprudence as having established the detailed pattern of Hajj rites subsequently codified in Islamic law, since Muhammad's own performance of the pilgrimage's various stages during this journey became the model later generations of Muslims have followed in performing the Hajj themselves.