feel anything?’ He answered, ‘No—but I sense a burning in my chest.’ Then he began to recite:

‘Would that, before what has now dawned on me,
I had been high in the mountain crags, herding wild ibex!
Keep death ever before your eyes and beware
the ambush of Time—for Time indeed has its ambush.’ (1)

Marwān ibn al-Ḥakam related—from Muʿāwiyah ibn Abī Sufyān, (from Abū Sufyān) (2) ibn Ḥarb—who said:

‘I set out with Umayyah ibn Abī al-Ṣalt on a trading journey to Syria. Whenever we halted at a campsite (3) he would take out a scripture and read it. We continued so until we came to a Christian village. When its people saw him, they recognised him, presented him with gifts, and escorted him to their church. He returned to us around midday, threw himself down, produced two black garments and put them on, and said:

“Abū Sufyān, would you like to meet a Christian scholar—one to whom the knowledge of the scriptures has ultimately reached—so that you may ask him whatever you wish?” I replied, “No.” So he went off alone.

He came back well into the night, cast off the two garments, and collapsed onto his bedding. By Allah, he neither slept nor rose until dawn, and when morning came he was gloomy and sorrowful; he did not speak to us, nor did we speak to him. We travelled on for two nights while he remained weighed down with grief. I said to him, “I have never seen anything like the state you were in after you returned from that learned man!” He said, “It concerns my final return.” I asked, “And do you really have a final return?” He replied, “Indeed—by Allah, I shall surely die, and I shall surely be called to account.”

I said, “Would you accept a wish of mine?” He asked, “About what?” I said, “That you will neither be resurrected nor judged.” He laughed and said, “Yes, by Allah—you shall certainly be resurrected and certainly be judged, and you shall enter: a party in Paradise and a party in the Blaze.”

I asked, “In which of the two will you be? Did that scholar tell you?” He replied, “My companion knows nothing of that—neither concerning me nor concerning himself.”

Thus we passed the night in this manner: he marvelled at us, and we laughed among ourselves, until we reached the Ghūṭah.’