Saif ibn ʿUmar (1) related—through ʿAmr ibn Muḥammad, from al-Shaʿbī—that when Khalid conquered al-Ḥīrah he performed eight rakʿahs of prayer, ending them with a single taslīm.
ʿAmr ibn al-Qaʿqāʿ also recited, in those very days and about the Muslims who were slain there and in the time of the Ridda (2):
[long-meter verse]
May Allah send rain upon the martyrs who lie by the Euphrates (3), ever abiding there,
and upon others along the ridges of sheltering Najaf.
We trod Hormuz underfoot at al-Kawāẓim,
and at al-Thani we broke the twin horns of Qārin amid the gullies.
On the day we ringed the palaces, calamity after calamity
poured down upon spacious al-Ḥīrah, one rout among many.
We cast them down from their heights (4), though their throne
was already rocking beneath them like a coward (5) who flinches.
We showered them with volleys, and they beheld
death’s evening draught encircling those precincts (6).
That very morning they declared, “We are a people who have come down
to the fertile riverlands from the rugged desert of the Arabs.”
Jarīr ibn ʿAbd Allāh al-Bajali then arrived before Khalid ibn al-Walīd (7) while he was in al-Ḥīrah, after the many engagements and the spoils already mentioned; Jarīr had shared in none of them, for al-Ṣiddīq had dispatched him with Khalid ibn Saʿīd ibn al-ʿĀṣ to Syria. Jarīr asked Khalid ibn Saʿīd for permission to return to al-Ṣiddīq so that he might rally his people, the Bajīlah, to join him (8). When he came to al-Ṣiddīq and made this request, al-Ṣiddīq grew angry and said, “You have come to distract me from something more pleasing to Allah than what you are calling me to.” He then sent him—al-Ṣiddīq—to Khalid ibn al-Walīd in Iraq.
Saif, with his chains of transmission, continued: Afterwards Ibn Ṣalūbā came and made peace with Khalid over Bāniqīyā and Barsūmā (9) and the surrounding districts for ten thousand dinars. The dehqāns of those lands also approached him and concluded truces (10) for their towns and families, just as the people of al-Ḥīrah had done (11).
It so happened during those very days, when [Khalid] had secured the borders of Iraq and taken possession of al-Ḥīrah and those—