Kufah, filling the mosque, the courtyard, and the palace so that he could demand from them a formal renunciation of ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib.

ʿAbd al-Raḥmān said: I was sitting with a group of my Anṣār companions while the people were in great distress over the matter and under siege. I then nodded off for a moment—yes, I dozed briefly—and I saw something approaching: it had an unusually long neck, like the neck of a camel, shaggy and drooping.

I asked, ‘What are you?’ It replied, ‘I am al-Naqqād Dhū ’l-Raqabah; I have been sent to the master of this palace.’ I awoke in fright and asked my companions, ‘Did you see what I just saw?’ They said, ‘No.’ I then related what I had seen to them—no sooner had I finished (1) than a man came out of the palace and announced, ‘The governor says to you: Depart from me, for I am occupied,’ and it turned out that the plague had struck him. (2)

Ibn Abī ’l-Dunyā also reports that when Ziyād took charge of Kufah he inquired about its most devout inhabitant. He was directed to a man named Abū al-Mughīrah al-Ḥimyari, who was brought before him. Ziyād said, ‘Stay in your house and do not leave it, and I shall give you whatever amount of money you wish.’ He replied, ‘Even if you were to give me dominion over the whole earth, I would not abandon attending the congregational prayer.’ Ziyād then said, ‘Then keep to the congregation but do not speak about anything.’ He answered, ‘I cannot give up enjoining right and forbidding wrong.’ Ziyād therefore ordered that he be beheaded. At the point of death his son said to him, ‘Father, I have prepared sixty garments in which to shroud you.’ He replied, ‘My son, what is approaching your father is either a garment better than the one he now wears, or a swift stripping away.’ (3)

This is exceedingly strange.

Saʿsaʿah ibn Nāǧiyah (4)—son of ʿIqāl (5) ibn Muḥammad ibn Sufyān ibn Mujāshiʿ ibn Dārim—was a leader among his people both in the pre-Islamic period and in Islam. It is said that before Islam he rescued three hundred and sixty infant girls who had been sentenced to burial alive; some say four hundred, and others say ninety-six. When he embraced Islam, the Messenger of Allah ﷺ told him, ‘You shall have the reward for that, for Allah has favored you with Islam.’ (6)

It is related of him that the first child he saved from being buried alive was when two of his she-camels had wandered off and he went in search of them. He said: ‘While I was at night…’