Who are the people of the period of ignorance, and are the polytheists before the mission included among them?

The questioner : I heard that some scholars say that those who were before the Messenger (peace and blessings be upon him), before his mission, are from the people of the interval. Is that so, and who are the scholars who say that?

The Shaykh : As for who they are, leave it covered; it does not concern you. It is better to know the truth. There is no benefit in naming the scholars, especially if the result is that they are mistaken. This does not concern us. As for the first part of the question, the definition of the interval, according to the consensus of scholars, is those to whom the call of a Prophet did not reach. That is, the proof of Allah was not established against them.
Therefore, it must be said that the polytheists who were before the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) are from the people of the period of ignorance, meaning those to whom the call of the Messenger did not reach. This is certainly an error, because we know that Ibrahim came to the Arabs in their own land and built for them the Sacred House of Allah, as did his son Isma'il and so on. The Arabs inherited these laws from generation to generation, some of the ordinances that were from the law of Ibrahim (peace be upon him), the most prominent and greatest of which was their pilgrimage to the Sacred House of Allah, their circumambulation of the House, and their drawing near to Allah through that. Among the rulings they inherited was, for example, circumcision; the Arabs knew of circumcision, and some of them, though a minority, were upon the oneness of Allah. This is from the perspective of known history. As for moving from this type of evidence to other legal proofs, one finds a great deal of that. For example, the hadith narrated by Imam Muslim in his Sahih that the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) was one day riding his mule when the sun beat down on him, so he looked and saw two graves there, and he said .
So if these people died in the pre-Islamic age of ignorance, they will be punished with the punishment of the grave; if they had been from the people of the period of ignorance, they would not have been punished. There is a great deal of this, and very much indeed; if a person were to follow it up, a subtle message would emerge in this area. And among this, finally, are two hadiths. Many Muslim scholars in the present day, let alone the common people, are bad at standing toward them; some of them explicitly reject them by declaring them weak, whereas they are authentic, and some of them use the method of going around in circles which they call ta'wil (figurative interpretation). One of them is from the hadith of Anas ibn Malik (may Allah be pleased with him). A man came to the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) and said ?
His saying (peace be upon him) about his father, who is a part of his father, and what hurts him hurts his father, and what saddens him is like the nature of Allah, yet he had no choice but to clarify this truth so that people would not come, as in this time, looking at this issue with a purely emotional view devoid of legal evidence, and saying, "No, this is impossible; how can the father of the Messenger (peace be upon him) be in the Fire?" They take the matter as a matter of lineage rather than a matter of belief. This is the first hadith, and it is in Sahih Muslim. But some of the later scholars interpreted it, saying that when the Messenger said "my father," he meant my uncle. This is a very cold and forced interpretation, because any person who speaks the Arabic language, if he says "my father died," or "my father came," or "he is sick," or so on, who does the Arab understand? The father who is the truth. So when this man came and said about his father who died in the pre-Islamic age of ignorance, "Where is my father?" there is no doubt that he understood it as we do, with the correct understanding, and the Messenger understands it more correctly than the correct. So he told him, "In the Fire." Naturally, this answer is sad for the questioner, as we mentioned earlier, so it was a matter of consolation and condolence; he called out to him and said, "My father and your father are in the Fire." As if he is saying to him, "Do not be grieved about your father in relation to me? I am the Prophet of Allah and the Messenger of Allah and the master of mankind, as he (peace be upon him) said in the authentic hadiths, and yet my father is in the Fire. This means I have no power to harm or benefit him, and I cannot intercede for him, because there is no intercession for a polytheist. So this contained, as they say, killing two birds with one stone: first, consolation for him, and second, teaching us that kinship here does not benefit. This is the first hadith, and it is in Sahih Muslim. Another hadith narrated by Muslim in a connected chain and by al-Bukhari in a suspended chain, from the hadith of Abu Hurayrah (may Allah be pleased with him), who said: The Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings be upon him) said . In some of the authentic narrations, this was during a journey of his (peace be upon him); he deviated from the road and found him sitting by a grave and weeping. 'Umar ibn al-Khattab saw him and asked, "O Messenger of Allah, what is the matter with you? If we find you weeping, we weep, and if not, we feign weeping." He said this hadith: "I me." So it was right for him (peace be upon him) to weep. O Allah. Please, Professor.