“No.”

He replied, “That was a good thing intended for your father, but he would not accept it (1).”

Another version of the report comes through a different chain. Ishāq ibn Bishr narrated from Muḥammad ibn Isḥāq, from al-Zuhrī, from Saʿīd ibn al-Musayyib and ʿUthmān ibn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, from al-Zuhrī, on the authority of Saʿīd ibn al-Musayyib, who said:

After the Conquest of Mecca (2), al-Fāriʿah, the sister of Umayyah ibn Abī al-Ṣalt, came to the Messenger of Allah ﷺ. She was a woman of intelligence, sound judgment, and beauty, and the Messenger of Allah ﷺ admired her. One day he asked, “O Fāriʿah, do you remember any of your brother’s poetry?”

She answered, “Yes—and what I have seen is even more astonishing (3).” She related:

“My brother had been on a journey. When he returned he came first to me, entered the house, and lay down on the bed while I was paring a piece of leather in my hand. Suddenly two white birds—or what looked like two white birds—appeared. One perched on the skylight; the other came inside and settled upon him. The one that had alighted on him split him open from his collarbone down to his pubic region, reached into his body, removed his heart, placed it in its palm, and smelled it.

“The bird on the skylight called out, ‘Is he aware?’ It replied, ‘He is aware.’ It asked, ‘Is he purified?’ It said, ‘He has refused.’ Then it returned the heart to its place, and the wound closed faster than the blink of an eye. After that, both birds flew away.

“When I saw this, I went over to him, shook him, and asked, ‘Do you feel anything?’

“He said, ‘Nothing—save a slight weakness in my body.’ I had been terrified by what I had witnessed, and he asked, ‘Why do I see you so alarmed?’ I told him what had happened.

“He said, ‘Good was intended for me, but then it was turned away.’ Then he began to recite:

My worries have spent the night stealing upon me;
I shield my eyes, yet tears outrun my hands.
Certain knowledge has reached me, yet no release
conveyed by a clear-voiced herald has been granted me.
Shall I be among those whom the blazing Fire
burns, its fierce awnings hemming them in on every side?
Or shall I dwell in the Garden promised to the righteous,
where cushions are arrayed in ordered rows?
Those two abodes are not the same, nor are the deeds—
the paths that lead to them—at all alike.
Two companies there are: one company enters the Garden,
its orchards encompassing them