al-Qays came to the Messenger of Allah ﷺ and he instructed them to have faith in Allah, Exalted is He. He asked, “Do you know what faith in Allah means?” They replied, “Allah and His Messenger know best.” He said, “It is to testify that there is no deity but Allah and that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, to establish the prayer, pay the zakat, fast during Ramadan, and to give one-fifth of the booty.” (1)

It was narrated by Abū Dāwūd on the authority of Aḥmad.

Muḥammad ibn ʿAmr ibn ʿUbaydah al-ʿUsfurī said: I heard ʿAlī ibn al-Madīnī say, “I saw Khālid ibn al-Ḥārith in a dream and asked him, ‘What has Allah done with you?’ He replied, ‘He forgave me, though the reckoning was severe.’ I asked, ‘And what of Yaḥyā al-Qaṭṭān?’ He said, ‘We behold him like a resplendent star shining on the horizon of the sky.’”

They said: Yaḥyā ibn Saʿīd passed away in Ṣafar of the year 198 AH, four months before the deaths of Ibn Mahdī and Ibn ʿUyaynah—may Allah have mercy on them all.

Abū Bakr ibn Abī Dāwūd said: My father related to me, from Muḥammad ibn Saʿīd al-Tirmidhī, who said, “I travelled to Basra to collect hadith. Yaḥyā ibn Saʿīd al-Qaṭṭān used to sit on an elevated platform, and the hadith students would file past him one by one; he would relate a hadith to each of them. I passed by intending to question him, and he said to me, ‘Climb up, recite in a flowing tone, and recite from a single surah.’ So I recited, ‘When the earth is shaken…’ whereupon he collapsed unconscious, and a butcher’s wooden beam struck him.”