Muḥammad ibn Isḥāq said: “A reliable informant told me, on the authority of ʿAbd Allāh ibn Kaʿb, the client of ʿUthmān ibn ʿAffān, that he was informed that ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb was once sitting with the people in the Mosque of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ when a man of the Arabs entered the mosque intending to approach him. As soon as ʿUmar saw him he remarked, ‘That man is still upon his polytheism—he has not yet abandoned it—or else he used to be a soothsayer in the Days of Ignorance.’
The man greeted him with salām and sat down. ʿUmar asked, ‘Have you embraced Islam?’ He replied, ‘Yes, O Commander of the Believers.’
ʿUmar then said, ‘Were you a soothsayer in the pre-Islamic era?’
The man exclaimed, ‘Glory be to Allah, O Commander of the Believers! You have formed an opinion of me and addressed me in a way I do not think you have used with anyone under your rule since you assumed office.’
ʿUmar responded, ‘O Allah, forgive! In the time of ignorance we were upon even worse than that—worshipping idols and clinging to graven images—until Allah honored us through His Messenger and through Islam.’
‘Indeed, by Allah, O Commander of the Believers,’ the man replied, ‘I was a soothsayer in the Days of Ignorance.’
ʿUmar asked, ‘Then tell me what your familiar spirit brought you.’
He answered, ‘About a month—or a little less—before Islam he came to me and said:
Have you not seen the jinn, how bewildered they are,
how they despair of their religion,
and how they cling to riding camels and the ropes of their saddle-cloths?’
Ibn Isḥāq remarks: ‘These words are rhymed prose (sajʿ), not poetry.’
[ʿAbd Allāh ibn Kaʿb continues:] At that point ʿUmar began telling the people: ‘By Allah, I was once beside one of the idols of the pre-Islamic Arabs with a party of Quraysh when a Bedouin sacrificed a calf for it. We were waiting for him to distribute the meat among us when I heard, from inside the calf, a voice the like of which I had never heard—more powerful than any other—saying:
O Dhariḥ! An auspicious affair; a man who will proclaim,
saying: “There is no god but Allah.”
Ibn Hishām adds that another version has: ‘a man who will cry out, in clear eloquence, saying: “There is no god but Allah.”’
He said: ‘A scholar versed in poetry then recited to me: [in the Sarīʿ metre]’