The Farewell Sermon

In 632 CE, during what would be his only and final Hajj, the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ delivered a sermon at Mount Arafat to well over one hundred thousand Muslims who had gathered with him — an address remembered as the Farewell Sermon (Khutbat al-Wada). In it, he covered a wide range of themes: the sanctity of life and property, the prohibition of usury and revenge killings from the pre-Islamic era, the rights owed between husbands and wives, the equality of all people regardless of race or lineage except through righteousness, and the instruction to hold firmly to the Quran and his own example (Sunnah) after his death. He repeatedly asked the crowd whether he had conveyed the message, and they affirmed that he had. The sermon is treated as a summary of the core ethical and social teachings of Islam, delivered near the very end of his life to the largest audience he ever addressed directly. Shortly after this Hajj, the final verses of the Quran were revealed affirming that the religion had been completed, and the Prophet ﷺ passed away a few months later in Medina.