Articles
Sending Blessings on the Prophet: What Comes Back to You
A popular list claims forty benefits for sending salawat upon the Prophet, but it circulates with no chain behind it. Here is what actually traces back to a graded hadith — and an honest account of what does not.
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- The Quran Gallery team
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- 6 min read
Salawat — asking Allah to bless the Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him) — is not a favor Muslims do for someone who no longer needs it. Allah opens the command Himself:
إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ وَمَلَـٰٓئِكَتَهُۥ يُصَلُّونَ عَلَى ٱلنَّبِىِّ ۚ يَـٰٓأَيُّهَا ٱلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُوا۟ صَلُّوا۟ عَلَيْهِ وَسَلِّمُوا۟ تَسْلِيمًا
“Indeed, Allah confers blessing upon the Prophet, and His angels [ask Him to do so]. O you who have believed, ask [Allah to confer] blessing upon him and ask [Allah to grant him] peace.”
Allah names Himself and His angels as already doing this before He asks believers to join in. That ordering is worth sitting with before anything else: the act you are commanded to perform is one Allah performs first. What follows is not that theology, though — it is a narrower and more practical question. A short saying, said to be extracted from Ibn al-Qayyim’s Jalāʾ al-Afhām, has circulated for years online as “forty benefits of sending salawat upon the Prophet.” It is a bare, unnumbered-by-source list: forty short lines, no isnād, no book, no page attached to any of them. That is not how Ibn al-Qayyim’s actual book reads — Jalāʾ al-Afhām is a lengthy, heavily-referenced study of the subject — and the popular list is best read as a later digest of it, not a text you can open and check. This article does the checking a digest skips: it traces a smaller number of these claimed returns back to a hadith you can actually locate, names the collection and the grading each time, and says plainly which parts of the popular list this search could not verify.
The most direct return is stated without qualification. Anas b. Mālik and ʿAbdullāh b. ʿAmr b. al-ʿĀṣ (may Allah be pleased with them) both report the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) saying:
“Whoever sends blessings upon me once, Allah sends blessings upon him tenfold because of it.”
This is recorded as hadith 330 in al-Adhkār of Imām al-Nawawī, on printed page 114 of , narrated there on the authority of ʿAbdullāh b. ʿAmr through Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim. There is no ambiguity in the wording and no dispute about its authenticity: every salawat you send is met, at minimum, tenfold — not metaphorically, but as a stated exchange.
Immediately following it on the same page, al-Nawawī records a second hadith, on the authority of Abū Hurayrah (may Allah be pleased with him), with al-Tirmidhī’s own grading of ḥasan attached:
“The people who have the greatest claim on me on the Day of Resurrection are those who send the most blessings upon me.”
This is the same hadith 331 on printed page 114 of . Nearness to the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) on that day is not distributed by lineage, era, or how much a person’s name is known — it is measured against a habit anyone can build starting today.
Two further hadiths, on printed page 115 of , describe a response rather than a reward. The first, from Abū Hurayrah via Sunan Abī Dāwūd with what al-Nawawī calls a sound chain:
“Do not turn my grave into a place of festival, and send blessings upon me, for your blessings reach me wherever you are.”
The second, narrated with the same grading:
“No one greets me with peace but Allah returns my soul to me, so that I may return his greeting.”
Distance is stated here as irrelevant. Whether the one sending blessings stands at the grave in Madinah or has never traveled there, the hadith describes the same reception on the other end — and a personal, individual reply, not a general acknowledgment.
On that same page, al-Nawawī records a warning stated as its own hadith — hasan according to al-Tirmidhī, from Abū Hurayrah:
“May the nose of a man be rubbed in dust — one before whom I was mentioned and he did not send blessings upon me.”
This is not a curse the Prophet (peace be upon him) pronounces out of anger; it is a supplication of disgrace directed at a specific, avoidable failure. Sending salawat when his name is mentioned is what places a person outside its reach, not any special effort beyond that.
Printed page 116 of carries a related hadith from ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib (may Allah be pleased with him), graded ḥasan ṣaḥīḥ by al-Tirmidhī:
“The miser is the one before whom I am mentioned and he does not send blessings upon me.”
Miserliness, in the Qurʾān and hadith, is almost always about withholding wealth. Here the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) applies the same word to withholding something that costs nothing — a few words of blessing — at the one moment it is most naturally due.
Beyond individual acts of salawat, its absence from a gathering carries its own consequence. Ibn Rajab al-Ḥanbalī records al-Tirmidhī’s wording, graded ḥasan ṣaḥīḥ, from Abū Hurayrah:
“No people sit in a gathering in which they neither remember Allah nor send blessings on their Prophet, but it becomes a loss held against them — if He wills, He punishes them for it, and if He wills, He forgives them.”
This is recorded on printed page 1/370 of in Ibn Rajab’s Jāmiʿ al-ʿUlūm wa-l-Ḥikam, where he also notes Aḥmad’s Musnad preserving several independent routes to the same wording. A gathering of Muslims — a meal, a meeting, a long conversation — is not neutral ground by default; a few words of dhikr and salawat before it ends are what keep it from becoming a deficit rather than a gain.
Honesty requires naming what did not hold up under this same search. The claim that salawat is answered with acceptance of a duʿāʾ traces to a report al-Nawawī records on printed page 117 of :
“Supplication remains suspended between heaven and earth; none of it ascends until you send blessings upon your Prophet.”
But this is not a hadith of the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) at all — it is mawqūf, a statement attributed to ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb (may Allah be pleased with him), and its narrator, Abū Qurrah al-Asadī, is one whose name and reliability are not established, as later hadith critics who examined this exact report point out. It is worth repeating with that caveat attached, not without it. Several other items on the popular list — that salawat repels poverty specifically, that it guarantees the Prophet’s intercession on a fixed schedule, that a name is “presented” to him in some describable mechanism — could not be traced to any hadith this search located with a page a reader could open. Sparse and honestly labeled is the standard this article holds itself to; repeating an unsourced list of forty would not meet it.
What is established, without any of that padding, is enough on its own: a tenfold return that Allah Himself promises, a nearness to the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) on the one day nearness will matter most, a personal reply across any distance, and protection from being counted among the miserly or the disgraced. The wording for saying it correctly, along with the rest of the Quran Gallery’s authenticated collection of remembrances, is in the Adhkar app — a place to practice this specific act of worship with texts that are known to be sound, rather than a list that only sounds like it is.