Thereupon he said, “So that Allah may accomplish a matter already decreed” (Quran 8:42). He disappeared beneath the water, then surfaced again, declaring, “That is the decree of the All-Mighty, the All-Knowing” (Quran 6:96), and drowned. When the Khārijites were certain he had gone under, they shouted the takbīr and scattered in all directions. The commander of al-Ḥajjāj’s army arrived, pulled Shabīb from the river with his coat of mail still on him, and ordered that his chest be split open (1). They removed his heart and found it compact and hard, like a stone; when they struck it against the ground it bounced the height of a man.

[Another report says that some of his own men, who loathed him for what he had done to their clans, were with him in the rearguard. They consulted one another and said, “Let us cut the bridge while he is on it.” They did so, the boats supporting the bridge lurched, his horse panicked, and he fell into the river and drowned. They cried out, “The Commander of the Faithful has drowned!” Al-Ḥajjāj’s troops understood what had happened, came, and retrieved the body] (2).

When news of Shabīb’s death reached his mother she said, “You have spoken truly. While I was pregnant with him I dreamed that a shooting star of fire issued from my womb. I knew then that fire is quenched only by water, and that only water would extinguish him.” His mother was a slave-girl named Jahīzah (3), a beautiful woman and among the bravest of women; she used to fight at her son’s side in battle.

Qāḍī Ibn Khallikān (4) relates that she was killed in this very campaign, and that his wife Ghazālah was also slain. Ghazālah too was a formidable Khārijite warrior—fighting with a ferocity that daunted seasoned men. Al-Ḥajjāj feared her intensely, to the point that one poet said of him (5):

A lion when you face me, yet in war an ostrich,
Flustered, fleeing the whistle of the scout’s horn!
Why did you not meet Ghazālah upon the field?
Your heart was fluttering in a frightened bird’s wings!

Shabīb ibn Yazīd ibn Nuʿaym ibn Qays ibn ʿAmr ibn al-Ṣalt ibn Qays ibn Sharāḥīl ibn Ṣubrah ibn Dhuhl ibn Shaybān [al-Shaybānī] claimed the caliphate and styled himself Commander of the Faithful. [Had Allah not subdued him by drowning, he would—if Allah willed—have attained the caliphate, and none could have withstood him] (6). Allah vanquished him, however, at the hands of al-Ḥajjāj after the Commander of the Faithful ʿAbd al-Malik sent the Syrian army against him. Shabīb fled more than once, and when his mount pitched him off the bridge over the Dujayl River (7) a man called out, “Are you drowning, O Commander of the Faithful?” He replied, “That is the decree of the All-Mighty, the All-Knowing” (Quran 6:96), and then he was borne away.