Al-Zuhrī likewise transmitted it from ʿUrwah, and al-Bayhaqī recorded the report.(1) Allah knows best which of these views is correct.

Al-Zuhrī, on the authority of ʿUrwah, said: “We have been informed that the Messenger of Allah ﷺ paid the blood-money for Ibn al-Ḥaḍramī and continued to regard the Sacred Month as inviolable, just as it had always been, until Allah revealed Sūrat al-Barāʾah.”(3)

Ibn Isḥāq(4) related that Abū Bakr al-Ṣiddīq, in answer to the idolaters’ charge that the Sacred Month had been violated during the expedition of ʿAbd Allah ibn Jahsh, recited the following lines. Ibn Hishām(5) attributes them to ʿAbd Allah ibn Jahsh himself:

—from the ṭawīl metre—
You deem a killing in the Sacred Month a heinous deed,
yet far more heinous—were a man of insight to reflect—
Is your turning away from what Muḥammad proclaims,
your disbelief in him, while Allah sees and bears witness.
You drove the people of Allah from His Sacred Mosque
so that no worshipper might be seen there bowing to the Lord.
So though you taunt us for that slaying and every spiteful hater
spreads his alarms against Islam,
We drenched our spears with Ibn al-Ḥaḍramī’s blood at Nakhlah
when the kindler of war had fanned its flames;
And ʿUthmān, son of ʿAbd Allah, was held among us,
struggling against a stubborn rawhide fetter that bound him fast.

Section: The change of the qiblah in the second year of the Hijrah, before the Battle of Badr

Some have said that this occurred in Rajab of that year; this was the view of Qatādah, Zayd ibn Aslam, and is one report from Muḥammad ibn Isḥāq.(7)

Aḥmad(8) has transmitted from Ibn ʿAbbās a narration pointing to the same, and it is also the apparent purport of the ḥadīth of al-Barāʾ ibn ʿĀzib, as will be mentioned below.