gushing forth. The Messenger of Allah ﷺ then said,

“Had I not felt shy before my Lord—Exalted and Majestic—we would have gone on drawing and drinking. Call out among my Companions: ‘Whoever is in need of water!’”

So I called out, and everyone who wanted some took what he needed. Thereafter the Messenger of Allah ﷺ rose for the prayer. Bilāl wished to pronounce the iqāmah, but the Messenger of Allah ﷺ said to him,

“The brother of Ṣudāʾa has given the adhān, and whoever gives the adhān should give the iqāmah.”

Al-Ṣudāʾī continues: I therefore gave the iqāmah. When the Messenger of Allah ﷺ had finished the prayer I brought him the two documents and said, “O Messenger of Allah, excuse me from these.”

He asked, “What has made you change your mind?”

I replied, “I heard you, O Messenger of Allah, say, ‘There is no good in authority for a believing man,’ and I believe in Allah and His Messenger. I also heard you say to the beggar, ‘Whoever asks people while he is self-sufficient brings upon himself a persistent headache and a pain in the stomach,’ yet I asked you while I am well-off.”

He said, “That is indeed so. If you wish, keep them, and if you wish, abandon them.”

I said, “I abandon them.”

The Messenger of Allah ﷺ then said to me, “Show me a man whom I may appoint over you.” I pointed him to one of the men who had come in the delegation, and he appointed him over them.

We then said, “O Messenger of Allah, we have a well whose water suffices us in winter and around which we gather, but in summer its water diminishes and we scatter to the surrounding water sources. We have embraced Islam, while all those around us are enemies. Pray to Allah on behalf of our well so that its water will suffice us and we may gather around it and not disperse.”

He took seven small stones, rolled them in his hand, supplicated over them, and then said,

“Take these stones; when you reach the well, cast them in one by one while mentioning Allah.”

Al-Ṣudāʾī says: We did as he instructed us, and thereafter we could no longer see its bottom—that is, the bottom of the well.

This ḥadīth has corroborating chains in the Sunan of Abū Dāwūd, al-Tirmidhī, and Ibn Mājah (1).

Al-Wāqidī further relates that after the ʿUmrah of al-Jiʿrānah (2) the Messenger of Allah ﷺ dispatched Qays ibn Saʿd ibn ʿUbādah with four hundred men to the lands of Ṣudāʾa to pacify them. They sent a man who said, “I have come to you so that you may turn the army back from my people, and I guarantee them to you.” A delegation of fifteen of them then arrived, and at the Farewell Pilgrimage he saw one hundred of them. Al-Wāqidī also transmitted—through al-Thawrī, from ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Ziyād ibn Anʿam, from Ziyād ibn Nuʿaym, from Ziyād ibn al-Ḥārith al-Ṣudāʾī—the account of his adhān.

The Delegation of al-Ḥārith ibn Ḥassān al-Bakrī to the Messenger of Allah ﷺ

Imām Aḥmad reports (4): Zayd ibn al-Ḥabbāb narrated to us; Abū al-Mundhir Sallām ibn Sulaymān al-Naḥwī narrated to us; ʿĀṣim ibn Abī al-Najūd narrated to us, from Abū Wāʾil, from al-Ḥārith al-Bakrī, who said: “I set out to complain about al-ʿAlāʾ ibn al-Ḥaḍramī to…”