The Talbiyah Was Preserved Word for Word; the Reports About Its Reward Were Not

The moment a pilgrim enters iḥrām, a single sentence is meant to leave their mouth before almost anything else: the talbiyah. It is short enough to memorise on first hearing and repeated enough that a pilgrim will have it by heart within an hour of the journey. What is less commonly known is how carefully its exact wording, down to where it ends, was kept — and how differently the tradition treats the sentence itself compared to the many later reports about what reciting it is said to earn.

Sālim reported, from his father ʿAbdullāh ibn ʿUmar: “I heard the Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings be upon him) raise his voice, saying:

لَبَّيْكَ اللَّهُمَّ لَبَّيْكَ. لَبَّيْكَ لَا شَرِيكَ لَكَ لَبَّيْكَ. إِنَّ الْحَمْدَ وَالنِّعْمَةَ لَكَ. وَالْمُلْكَ لَا شَرِيكَ لَكَ

Here I am, O Allah, here I am. Here I am, You have no partner, here I am. Truly all praise and all favour are Yours, and all sovereignty; You have no partner.” He did not go beyond these words.

The same report continues: “ʿAbdullāh ibn ʿUmar used to say that ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb would raise his voice with the Messenger of Allah’s iḥlāl, using these very words, and would [then] say: ‘Labbayka wa saʿdayk, wa’l-khayru fī yadayk, labbayka wa’l-raghbāʾu ilayka wa’l-ʿamal’ — Here I am, and at Your service twice over; all good is in Your hands; here I am, and every hope and every deed is directed toward You.”

— Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, printed page 2/842 of .

Read the two halves of that report together and something worth noticing emerges: it was not only the Prophet’s exact wording that his companions took care to preserve — the closing note “he did not go beyond these words” was preserved just as deliberately — but also the boundary of it. ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb, one of the closest companions to the Prophet and later the second caliph, personally added extra phrases of his own when he recited the talbiyah. His son recorded both things in the same breath: the Prophet’s sentence, and where a companion’s own addition began. Neither is left to blur into the other.

The talbiyah most often heard is Ibn ʿUmar’s four-clause version above. But it is not the only authentic wording the Ṣaḥīḥayn preserve. ʿĀʾishah, on the very same printed page of Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī as Ibn ʿUmar’s, gives a version that stops one clause earlier:

إِنِّي لَأَعْلَمُ كَيْفَ كَانَ النَّبِيُّ صَلَّى اللَّهُ عَلَيْهِ وَسَلَّمَ يُلَبِّي: لَبَّيْكَ اللَّهُمَّ لَبَّيْكَ، لَبَّيْكَ لَا شَرِيكَ لَكَ لَبَّيْكَ، إِنَّ الْحَمْدَ وَالنِّعْمَةَ لَكَ

“I certainly know how the Prophet (peace be upon him) used to say the talbiyah: Here I am, O Allah, here I am. Here I am, You have no partner, here I am. Truly all praise and all favour are Yours” — without the final clause “and all sovereignty; You have no partner” that closes Ibn ʿUmar’s version.

— Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, printed page 2/138 of , which carries both companions’ reports on the one page.

Neither report is the weaker one; both sit in the Ṣaḥīḥayn, narrated by two people who were in a position to know. A pilgrim reciting the fuller, four-clause form is reciting what most of the tradition settled on as the standard — but the shorter form is not an error someone invented, it is ʿĀʾishah’s own testimony about what she knew of the Prophet’s practice. The most repeated sentence in a pilgrim’s vocabulary survives, quite openly, in more than one wording, and the collections that record it made no attempt to smooth that difference away.

Separate from the wording itself is the question of how it should be said, and here the evidence is considerably stronger. Al-Sāʾib ibn Khallād reported, from his father, that the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) said:

أَتَانِي جِبْرِيلُ فَأَمَرَنِي أَنْ آمُرَ أَصْحَابِي وَمَنْ مَعِي أَنْ يَرْفَعُوا أَصْوَاتَهُمْ بِالْإِهْلَالِ

“Jibrīl came to me and commanded me to instruct my companions and those with me to raise their voices” — with iḥlāl, or he said, with talbiyah; the narrator meant either term.

— Sunan Abī Dāwūd, printed page 3/221 of . The editor’s note grades the chain ṣaḥīḥ, records that al-Tirmidhī called it ḥasan ṣaḥīḥ, and adds that al-Khaṭṭābī cited this very ḥadīth as the evidence used by those who hold that voicing the talbiyah is obligatory — a position attributed to Abū Ḥanīfah, under which failing to voice it requires an expiatory offering — against al-Shāfiʿī’s position that nothing is owed for omitting it. Both sides are reading the same report; they differ on what obligation it establishes, not on whether it is authentic.

Beyond the command to raise one’s voice, two further reports are commonly repeated about the talbiyah, and the same page of a critical edition of Sunan al-Tirmidhī grades both of them explicitly, one notch below outright ṣaḥīḥ. Asked which ḥajj is most excellent, the Prophet (peace be upon him) is reported to have said:

الْعَجُّ وَالثَّجُّ

“Raised voices, and flowing blood” — meaning a ḥajj marked by loud talbiyah and generous sacrifice.

And Sahl ibn Saʿd reported the Prophet (peace be upon him) as saying:

مَا مِنْ مُسْلِمٍ يُلَبِّي إِلَّا لَبَّى مَنْ عَنْ يَمِينِهِ أَوْ عَنْ شِمَالِهِ مِنْ حَجَرٍ أَوْ شَجَرٍ أَوْ مَدَرٍ، حَتَّى تَنْقَطِعَ الْأَرْضُ مِنْ هَاهُنَا وَهَاهُنَا

“There is no Muslim who recites the talbiyah except that whatever is to his right and his left — stone, tree, or clod of earth — recites it with him, until the earth is cut off from this side to that.”

— Sunan al-Tirmidhī, printed page 2/352 of . The editor grades the “raised voices, flowing blood” report ḥasan li-ghayrihi — hasan by virtue of its several supporting routes, not on its own single chain — and the stones-and-trees report ḥasan in its own right. Both are usable evidence in the tradition; neither is being claimed here as ṣaḥīḥ.

Beyond these sits a further layer of reports specifically about what reciting the talbiyah is said to secure for the one who says it, and here the grading drops again — this time explicitly, in the words of the critic collecting the reports rather than left for a reader to guess at. Al-Haythamī records, among several talbiyah-related reports in one place:

كَانَ النَّبِيُّ صَلَّى اللَّهُ عَلَيْهِ وَسَلَّمَ إِذَا فَرَغَ مِنْ تَلْبِيَتِهِ سَأَلَ اللَّهَ ﷿ مَغْفِرَتَهُ وَرِضْوَانَهُ وَاسْتَعْتَقَهُ مِنَ النَّارِ

“When the Prophet (peace be upon him) finished his talbiyah, he would ask Allah for His forgiveness and His good pleasure, and ask to be freed from the Fire” — narrated from Khuzaymah ibn Thābit.

— Majmaʿ al-Zawāʾid, printed page 3/224 of . Al-Haythamī names the narrator responsible, Ṣāliḥ ibn Muḥammad ibn Zāʾidah, and states plainly: Aḥmad [ibn Ḥanbal] judged him reliable, but a great many other critics judged him weak. That is a live disagreement among the specialists themselves, not a report this piece is asking a reader to trust as established.

None of this makes the talbiyah’s later virtues fabricated, and none of it is a reason to stop reciting it with the hope the tradition genuinely attaches to it — the command to raise one’s voice alone is resting on solid ground, and a ḥasan report is still a report worth acting on, only not with the same certainty as a ṣaḥīḥ one. What is worth noticing is the difference in how carefully each layer was kept. The sentence itself — its four clauses, the point at which the Prophet’s own wording stopped, and even the one clause on which two Companions’ testimonies genuinely differ — was preserved with a precision that named its own edges. The reports about what saying that sentence earns were preserved too, but openly at several different grades, down to a report two authorities have never agreed about. A tradition capable of recording, without embarrassment, that its own second caliph added personal words beyond the Prophet’s formula is not a tradition inclined to blur those distinctions elsewhere either.

If any citation or rendering above should be corrected, tell us; we would rather be corrected than leave an error standing. We ask Allah to accept every labbayk said in answer to His call, in whichever authentic wording it is said.