“We believe in the Lord of the boy! We believe in the Lord of the boy!”

Someone said to the king, “Do you see what you were afraid of? By Allah, the very thing you dreaded has come upon you: all the people have believed.”

So he ordered trenches to be dug at the mouths of the streets and fires to be kindled in them. He proclaimed, “Whoever renounces his faith—let him go; whoever does not, hurl him into it.” The people then rushed to the flames, falling over one another. A woman arrived carrying a nursing infant and hesitated to throw herself in, whereupon the child said, “Mother, be patient, for you are upon the truth.”

This wording is recorded by Imām Aḥmad. Muslim and al-Nasāʾī also narrate it through Ḥammād ibn Salamah; al-Nasāʾī and Ḥammād ibn Zayd—both reporting from Thābit—include an additional detail. Al-Tirmidhī relates it as well through ʿAbd al-Razzāq, from Maʿmar, from Thābit, with a similar chain, and he presented it with fine wording, as we have set out at length in the Tafsīr.

Muḥammad ibn Isḥāq gives the story in another form. He said: “Yazīd ibn Ziyād related to me from Muḥammad ibn Kaʿb, and some people of Najrān told me, citing their own community, that the inhabitants of Najrān were idol-worshipping polytheists. In one of its villages—near the great town of Najrān, to which all the surrounding people repair—there was a magician who taught the youths of Najrān sorcery. When Faymiyūn settled there (they did not give me the same name for him that Ibn Munabbih uses), they said: ‘A man arrived, pitched a tent between Najrān and the village where the sorcerer lived, and the people of Najrān kept sending their boys to that sorcerer to learn magic.’ Thāmir sent his son ʿAbd Allāh with those boys. Whenever ʿAbd Allāh passed by the man in the tent, he was struck by the devotion and prayer he saw, so he would sit with him and listen until he embraced Islam, affirmed the oneness of Allah, and worshipped Him. He began asking about the rulings of Islam, and once he had grasped them he asked about the Greatest Name, which the man knew. The man withheld it and said, ‘My nephew, you will not be able to bear it; I fear you are not strong enough.’ Thāmir—ʿAbd Allāh’s father—assumed his son was still visiting the sorcerer like the other boys. When ʿAbd Allāh realized his companion was reluctant to divulge the Name and feared for his weakness, he took several wooden lots, gathered them together, and wrote on each one every Name of Allah he knew, leaving none out.