Ibn Jarīr (1) relates: “In this very year Ibn al-Zubayr removed his brother ʿUbayda (2) from the governorship of Madinah and appointed his brother Muṣʿab in his place. The reason was that ʿUbayda delivered a sermon in which he said, ‘You have seen what Allah did to the people of Ṣāliḥ over a she-camel worth five hundred dirhams.’ When this remark reached his brother, he said, ‘This is pretentious showmanship,’ and dismissed him. Because of this ʿUbayda came to be nicknamed ‘the Camel Appraiser.’

Ibn Jarīr continues: “Toward the end of the same year Ibn al-Zubayr also dismissed ʿAbd Allah ibn Yazīd al-Khaṭmī from Kūfah and installed ʿAbd Allah ibn Muṭīʿ—who had commanded the Muhājirūn on the day of al-Ḥarrah, when they renounced allegiance to Yazīd (3).”

Ibn Jarīr (4) further says: “In this year as well the devastating plague swept through Basra.”

Ibn al-Jawzī records in al-Muntaẓam (5) that it occurred in 64 AH, though some say it took place in 69 AH (6); the latter is the more widely accepted date cited by our shaykh al-Dhahabi (7) and others. Its chief ravages were in Basra, and it lasted three days: on the first day seventy thousand of the city’s people died, on the second seventy-one thousand, and on the third seventy-three thousand. By the fourth morning almost everyone lay dead save for a few scattered individuals. It is even reported that the governor’s mother died and no one could be found to carry her out, so they hired four men to do it.

The ḥāfiẓ Abū Nuʿaym al-Iṣfahānī (8) narrates: “ʿUbayd Allah told us; Aḥmad ibn ʿIṣām told me; Maʿdī related to me from a man known as Abū an-Nafīd (9)—who had lived through that plague—who said:

‘We used to go round the tribes burying the dead, but when they became too many for us to manage we would enter a house whose occupants had perished and seal its door upon them. We went into one house, searched it, and found no one alive, so we sealed its door. When the plagues had passed, we made our rounds again, unsealing the doors. We opened the door that we had previously inspected—or, he said, the house whose door we had sealed—and searched it, and there we found a boy in the middle of the house, fresh-faced and anointed with oil, as though he had just been taken from his mother’s lap.

‘While we were standing over the child in amazement, a female dog came through a gap in the wall, clung to the boy, and the boy crawled toward her and suckled her milk.’

Maʿdī adds: ‘I later saw that same boy in the mosque of Basra, and he was stroking his beard.’”