Suhayb …—and so forth, completing the report. (1)
Al-Wāqidī said: ʿUthmān ibn Muḥammad narrated to us, from ʿAbd al-Ḥakam ibn Suhayb, from ʿUmar ibn al-Ḥakam, who said:
“Ammār ibn Yāsir was tortured until he no longer knew what he was saying, and Suhayb was likewise tortured until he no longer knew what he was saying, together with a number of other Muslims, until the verse was revealed: ‘Then, indeed, your Lord—to those who emigrated after they had been persecuted…’ (al-Naḥl 16:110). (2)
Mujāhid said: As for the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, his uncle protected him; as for Abū Bakr, his clan protected him. The others—including Suhayb, whom he explicitly named—were seized, dressed in iron coats of mail, and left to roast in the sun until their endurance was stretched to the limit. They then gave their captors what they demanded—namely, the utterance of disbelief. Each man’s people brought water-skins filled with water and cast him into them, all except Bilāl.
(1) Its complete wording runs as follows: “I have never allowed anyone to precede you. Yet I see you claim Arab descent while your tongue is foreign, you call yourself Abu Yahya, and you squander your wealth.” He replied, “As for what you call squandering, I spend only where it is due. As for my kunya Abu Yahya, the Messenger of Allah—peace be upon him—gave it to me and I will not abandon it. As for my Arab lineage, the Byzantines captured me when I was a child; I therefore learned their language, but I am a man of the tribe of al-Namr ibn Qasit.”
All the transmitters in the chain are trustworthy except Abd Allah, the father of Musab; no one declared him reliable apart from Ibn Hibban, whereas Ibn Main considered him weak. Ibn Saʿd recorded a similar version (3/226-227) through Ubayd Allah ibn ʿAmr, from Abd Allah ibn Muhammad ibn ʿAqil, from Hamzah ibn Suhayb, from his father. See also Asad al-Ghaba 3/39; al-Isaba 5/162; Tahdhib Ibn ʿAsakir 6/455.
(2) The report appears in Ibn Saʿd’s Tabaqat (3/248), where the Qurʾanic verse is quoted. Both the base manuscript and al-Isaba cite it as: wa-lladhina hajaru fi-llah min baʿdi ma futinu (“Those who emigrated for the sake of Allah after they had been persecuted”). Besides being a misreading—the correct phrase is min baʿdi ma zulimu (“after they had been wronged”)—this is not the verse revealed concerning those Companions; the correct verse is the one we have already cited. How this escaped the compiler and others is unclear. Al-Suyuti, however, reproduced the narrative from Ibn Saʿd in al-Durr al-Manthur (4/132) when explaining the reason for the revelation of the verse we have established.