ʿIkrimah likewise reported that the Messenger of Allah ﷺ pardoned him.
Al-Wāqidī said, “This is more firmly established for us than the report claiming that he had him executed.”
Abū Muʿāwiyah narrated: al-Aʿmash told us, from Ibrāhīm, who said, “People used to say that the Jews poisoned the Messenger of Allah ﷺ and poisoned Abū Bakr as well.”
In the Ṣaḥīḥ it is related from Ibn ʿAbbās that a woman from the Jews of Khaybar presented the Messenger of Allah ﷺ with a poisoned sheep.
Jābir, Abū Hurayrah and others reported that when the Messenger of Allah ﷺ conquered Khaybar and felt secure, Zaynab bint al-Ḥārith—Marḥab’s niece and the wife of Sallām ibn Mishkam—put a deadly poison in a she-goat she had slaughtered and roasted, concentrating the poison in the two forelegs and the shoulder. After the Prophet ﷺ had performed the sunset prayer and returned, she was sitting near his saddle and said, “O Abū al-Qāsim, this is a gift I have brought you.” The Prophet ﷺ ordered that it be taken, and it was placed before him while his Companions looked on, among them Bishr ibn al-Barāʾ ibn Maʿrūr. The Messenger of Allah ﷺ took hold of the foreleg and bit into it; Bishr picked up another bone and bit from it, and the rest of the company ate as well. When the Messenger of Allah ﷺ had swallowed one mouthful he said, “Withdraw your hands, for this foreleg is telling me that it is poisoned.”
Bishr exclaimed, “By the One who has honoured you, I sensed that from my very first bite, but nothing kept me from spitting it out except my dislike of making your food repugnant to you. Once I saw you swallow what was in your mouth, I was unwilling to prefer my own life to yours, and I hoped you would not have put it aside had it still contained any malice.” Bishr’s colour changed on the spot; the pain never left him, and after suffering for a year he died.
Some maintained that Bishr never even left his place before passing away. The Prophet ﷺ then summoned her and asked, “What moved you to do this?” She replied, “You afflicted my people and killed my father, my uncle and my husband, so I thought…”