- ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz ibn Muḥammad reported: al-Ḥusayn ibn Yaḥyā told us; he said: Aḥmad ibn al-Miqdām narrated to us; he said: ʿAbd al-Aʿlā ibn ʿAbd al-Aʿlā narrated from Hishām ibn Ḥassān, from Wāṣil, from ʿAmr ibn Haram, from ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd ibn Maḥmūd, who said ⦗1216⦘:
“I was in the company of Ibn ʿAbbās when a man arrived and said, ‘We were travelling for the pilgrimage. When we reached al-Ṣifāḥ one of our companions died. We dug a grave for him, but there was a black figure already occupying the side-niche. We dug a second grave, and again the black figure had taken the niche. We dug a third, and the black figure was still there. So we left him and have come to ask you what you instruct us to do.’
Ibn ʿAbbās replied, ‘That is the very deed he used to practice. Go and bury him in one of those graves, for by Allah, even if you were to dig the entire earth you would find the same.’
“So we cast him into one of those graves. When we finished our journey we went to his wife and asked her about him. She said, ‘He was a man who sold food. Each day he would take out the portion meant for his family, then he would fetch an equal amount of barley straw, chop it up, and mix it into the food in place of what he had taken.’”