they will recite the Qur’an, yet it will not pass beyond their throats; they will shoot out of Islam as an arrow shoots through its quarry. Their distinguishing sign is that among them there will be a man with a shriveled hand—on the upper part of his arm there hangs a dangling lump of flesh, upon which small hairs can be seen.

In another wording collected by al-Bukhari and Muslim:

“A band of renegades will break away at a time of division among the Muslims; they will be slain by the faction that is nearer to the truth of the two.”

These people appeared a little over twenty years after his death, toward the end of ʿAli’s caliphate, when the Muslims had split into two camps—the army of ʿAli and the army of Muʿawiyah. ʿAli ibn Abi Talib and his companions fought and killed them, and they were the faction nearer to the truth. The other faction killed ʿAmmar ibn Yasir; it was the group