Inside the Haram, Allah the Exalted has said, “Whoever enters it shall be safe.” This was a custom observed in the pre-Islamic era that Islam confirmed: if a person commits an offense that carries the death penalty outside the Haram and then seeks refuge inside the Sanctuary, the Sanctuary grants him protection and he may not be killed there. Someone might ask, “If we accept this rule, every criminal will simply flee to the Haram and take shelter there.” Our answer is: we will not kill him in the Haram, but we will restrict him until he leaves. How do we restrict him? The scholars have said: he is not to be given food or drink, no one may buy from him or sell to him, and no one is to speak to him. We tighten matters around him until, despite the vastness of the earth, it feels constricted for him; then what will he do? He will come out, and once he does, we carry out the punishment he deserves.
Thus they led Khubaib out of the Haram to the open area beyond it (al-Ḥill) in order to execute him. He asked their permission to pray two rakʿahs (units of ritual prayer), for the noblest of bodily acts is the prayer, and it is the bond between a servant and his Lord. They allowed him, so he prayed two rakʿahs. When he finished he said, “Had I not feared you would say that I was trying to delay death, I would have lengthened them.” Therefore he confined himself to just two rakʿahs and added, “Had I not feared you would think I was unnerved, I would have prayed still more,” for he was eager for prayer and loved to increase in it at the moment of his death. He then invoked against them with three supplications: “O Allah, count them one by one; slay them all and scatter them; leave not a single one of them alive.”
Allah answered his prayer: before a full year had passed, every one of them had been killed. This was among the honors Allah bestowed upon him. He then recited these verses:
I care not, so long as I die a Muslim,
on which of my sides for Allah my fall occurs.
All this is for the sake of Allah; and if He wills,
He will bless the severed limbs of a mangled corpse.
Thus one of the tokens of honor for this man was that Allah continued to provide for him.