He answered, “It is yours.”

Zechariah continued: “So she sent her guards to John while he was standing in his prayer-niche, and I was praying beside him. They slaughtered him in a large basin, after which his head and his blood were brought to her.”

The Messenger of Allah ﷺ then asked, “How much patience were you able to show?” He replied, “I did not even break my prayer.”

Zechariah went on: “When John’s head was brought and set before her, that very evening Allah caused the king, his household, and his attendants to be swallowed up by the earth. At daybreak the Children of Israel said, ‘The God of Zechariah has become angry for Zechariah; come, let us grow angry for our king and kill Zechariah.’

“So they came out looking for me in order to kill me. A warner reached me, so I fled, while Iblīs ran ahead of them pointing the way to me. When I feared I could no longer elude them, a tree appeared before me. It called out, ‘Come to me, come!’ split open, and I entered it. Iblīs came and seized the edge of my cloak, but the tree closed up, leaving a corner of the garment outside. The Children of Israel arrived, and Iblīs said, ‘Do you not see? He went into this tree. Here is the end of his robe—he entered it by sorcery.’

“They said, ‘Let us burn the tree.’ Iblīs replied, ‘Rather, saw it in two.’ So they sawed the tree—and me along with it—clear through.”

The Prophet ﷺ asked him, “Did you feel any touch or pain from that?” He said, “No. Only the tree, into which Allah had placed my soul, felt it.” (1)

This account is exceedingly strange, and the ḥadīth itself is remarkable; its attribution as a marfūʿ report is rejected, and in any case it contains matters that are objectionable. In none of the ḥadīths on the Night Journey is Zechariah—peace be upon him—mentioned except in this narration. What is reliably preserved in certain wordings of the Ṣaḥīḥ regarding the Night Journey (2) is: “I passed by the two maternal cousins, John and Jesus.” They are maternal cousins according to the majority, as the ḥadīth plainly indicates, for John’s mother, Ashyaʿ bint ʿImrān, was the sister of Mary daughter of ʿImrān. It has also been said that Ashyaʿ—the wife of Zechariah and mother of John—was the sister of Ḥannah, the wife of ʿImrān and mother of Mary; in that case John would still be Mary’s cousin. Allah knows best.

Scholars then differed over the place where John son of Zechariah was killed: was it inside al-Masjid al-Aqṣā or elsewhere? Al-Thawrī related from al-Aʿmash, from Shamir ibn ʿAṭiyyah: “Seventy prophets were killed upon the Rock in Jerusalem, among them John son of Zechariah—peace be upon him.”

Abū ʿUbayd al-Qāsim ibn Sallām said: ʿAbd Allāh ibn Ṣāliḥ narrated to us from al-Layth, from Yaḥyā ibn Saʿīd, from Saʿīd ibn al-Musayyab who said: “Nebuchadnezzar came to Damascus and found the blood of John son of Zechariah boiling. When he asked about it and was informed, he killed seventy thousand people over that blood, and only then did it subside.” (3)

This isnād is sound up to Saʿīd ibn al-Musayyab and indicates that John was killed in Damascus and that the episode with Nebuchadnezzar occurred after the time of Jesus, as stated by ʿAṭāʾ and al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī. Allah knows best.