Then the year 500 of the Prophetic Hijra began.

Abū Dāwūd said in his Sunan:

[1] Mūsā ibn Sahl narrated to us, Ḥajjāj ibn Ibrāhīm narrated to us, Ibn Wahb narrated to us; he said: Muʿāwiyah ibn Ṣāliḥ reported to me from ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Jubayr, from his father, from Abū Thaʿlabah al-Khushanī, who said: The Messenger of Allah ﷺ said, “Allah will not allow this ummah to be left helpless for more than half a day.”

[2] ʿAmr ibn ʿUthmān narrated to us, Abū al-Mughīrah narrated to us, Ṣafwān reported to me from Shurayḥ ibn ʿUbayd, from Saʿd ibn Abī Waqqāṣ, from the Prophet ﷺ, that he said [3]: “I hope that my community will not be found wanting before their Lord if He defers them but half a day.”

It was asked of Saʿd, “How long is half a day?” He replied, “Five hundred years.” [4]

This is one of the signs of prophethood. Specifying this period does not rule out its being exceeded, as events have shown, for the Prophet ﷺ mentioned some of the portents of the Hour that must inevitably take place exactly as he foretold. They will be seen in times after our own. With Allah lies success; Allah is the One whose help is sought, and there is no power and no might except with Allah.

Among the occurrences of this year was that the Sultan Muḥammad ibn Malik-Shāh besieged many of the strongholds of the bāṭiniyya (Ismāʿīlī sect). He captured a great number of them, killing vast multitudes of their adherents. Among the fortresses he took was a formidable citadel which his father had built near Isfahan on the summit of an impregnable mountain. The reason for its construction was that, on one of his hunting excursions, a hound escaped him; he pursued it to the mountain-top and found it there. With him at the time was an envoy from the Byzantines, who remarked, “If this mountain were in our lands we would build a fortress upon it.” Those words stirred the Sultan to erect a citadel on its peak. [5]

He expended on its construction one million two hundred thousand dinars. Later, however, a man of the bāṭiniyya named Aḥmad ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿAṭāsh [6] seized it, causing the Muslims great hardship. Sultan Muḥammad besieged the place for a full year until he captured it. He flayed that man, stuffed his skin with straw, severed his head, and had it paraded throughout the provinces. He then dismantled the fortress stone by stone. [The man’s wife threw herself from the top of the citadel and died, and whatever jewels she possessed were lost.]