Being an Account of Ammar ibn Yasir, Who Knew How He Would Die
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The desert sun didn’t just shine in Mecca. It pressed
down on you, like a giant hand belonging to some angry and indifferent god,
and if you were a slave—or the son of a slave, which amounted to pretty much
the same thing in the arithmetic of cruelty—it pressed down harder than most.
Abu Jahl knew this. He counted on it.
He was a big man in the way that small-souled men sometimes
become big: through fear, through tribe, through the understanding that if you
hurt people badly enough and publicly enough, nobody talks back. He had thugs.
Of course he had thugs. Men like Abu Jahl always do. They’re drawn to each
other the way flies are drawn to something rotting in the afternoon heat.
Every day—every single day, you understand, mark that—he
would have the family of Ammar ibn Yasir dragged out into the open. The old man
Yasir, who had come north from Yemen looking for a lost brother and found
instead a life of dependency and dust. Sumayyah, Yasir’s wife, who had been
born into slavery and carried herself like she’d never heard of the concept.
And Ammar himself, the son, dark-eyed and broad-shouldered, whose only crime
was believing in something Abu Jahl couldn’t buy, threaten, or break.
They made them wear armor. Red-hot armor. You think
about that for a second. You let it sit in the back of your mind the way a
stone sits in the bottom of a well.
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Muhammad could see them from across the city sometimes,
those three small figures staked out in the hammering light, and his hands
would clench at his sides because he had no army, no political standing,
nothing but words and the bone-deep certainty that those words were true.
He would go to them. He always went to them.
“Be patient,” he would say, crouching in the sand beside
them, touching their burned and blistered shoulders as gently as a man touches
something he is afraid of breaking. “Be patient, O family of Yasir. The place
promised to you is Paradise.”
It wasn’t much. He knew it wasn’t much. But it was the
truth, and sometimes the truth is the only comfort a person can offer when the
world has gone comprehensively and irredeemably wrong.
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Sumayyah was old. You need to understand that. The kind of
old where your bones are made of something more brittle than bone—memory,
maybe, or time itself. Abu Jahl figured this was a vulnerability. He figured
wrong.
He stood over her one afternoon, this big terrible man with
his entourage of yes-men and his burning capacity for cruelty, and he insulted
her with the kind of language that men like him think is a weapon and women
like her recognize as an admission of bankruptcy.
Sumayyah looked at him from the sand where they’d left her,
looked up at him the way a woman looks at something she stepped in, and she
spat in his face.
Direct hit.
“May Allah humiliate you,” she said, her voice as steady as
good timber. “You are smaller in my eyes than the beetle I crush under my foot.”
Abu Jahl stared at her. His face went through about six
colors. Then he took his spear.
Her blood soaked into the sand and the sand took it the way
sand takes everything—without judgment, without mercy, without any particular
interest at all. But the people watching would remember it. The people watching
would carry it with them for the rest of their lives, that image of a frail old
woman who died before she would break, and they would pass it to their children
like a lamp passed hand to hand in a dark room.
She was the first martyr in Islam. They called her shahidah.
Not long after, Yasir died too, the torture finally doing
what torture is designed to do. Ammar saw both of them go. He was there for
both of them. He had to be.
---
They worked on Ammar harder after that.
There’s a particular kind of evil that takes a personal
interest, that makes it a project. Abu Jahl’s interest in Ammar had
become exactly that. The boy—the man, really, but he would always be the boy in
Abu Jahl’s small and calculating mind—would not break the way a sensible person
breaks. This was an affront. This was a challenge.
They kept at him until Ammar’s tongue, that last citadel,
finally surrendered what his heart would not. In a voice he didn’t recognize as
his own, with his body in so much pain that pain had stopped meaning anything
and just became the weather of his existence, he said words in praise of their
gods. He spoke ill of the Prophet.
He felt it happen. He felt himself do it. And if you want to
know what the bottom of a human being feels like, that’s it right there—that
moment when your body has made a decision your soul will spend years trying to
forgive.
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He found the Prophet afterward. He was crying the way
exhausted people cry, not dramatically, just leaking, and he could
barely walk, and he stood there in his wounds and his shame and his absolute
wreckage and he told Muhammad what he had done.
“How did your heart feel when you said it?” the Prophet
asked.
It was such a strange and specific question that Ammar
stopped crying for a moment.
“It…” He put his hand over his chest. He seemed surprised. “It
remained calm. Firm in faith.”
Muhammad looked at his companion for a long time. Then he
said: “If they torture you again, just say what you said.”
This was mercy so precise it was almost surgical. This was a
man who understood that a man’s mouth and a man’s soul are not always the same
country.
---
The warning came, as the important warnings usually do,
during an ordinary moment.
Years later, in Medina, they were building the mosque at
Quba. The Prophet and his companions carried clay bricks by hand. Everyone
carried one brick at a time because a brick is heavy and the sun was still the
sun and men’s backs were still men’s backs.
Ammar carried two.
Of course he did. Of course Ammar ibn Yasir, who had watched
his parents die, who had been tortured for the better part of his adult life,
who had lost count of his own scars—of course he carried two bricks when
everyone else carried one. It seems almost funny, in a way that nothing about
the man was actually funny.
The Prophet came to him. Patted his shoulder, wiped the dust
from his head with the tenderness of a father, and told him what was coming.
Not today. Not soon, maybe. But coming.
“Woe to you, O Ammar. You will be killed by a rebellious
group. You will call them to Paradise, and they will call you to the Fire.”
Ammar just looked at him.
“I seek refuge in Allah from fitnah,” he said finally.
Trial. Tribulation. The great testing.
He didn’t ask when. He didn’t ask which group.
He just pulled his two bricks a little closer and got back to work. Some
people, when they find out how the story ends, decide not to live it. Ammar ibn
Yasir was not that kind of person.
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He was ninety-something years old at Siffin. Ninety-something.
The scholars argue about the exact number the way scholars do, but let’s just
say he was old in the way that people who have survived everything become old—not
withered exactly, but dense. Compressed. Like wood that has been under pressure
so long it’s become something harder than wood.
Ali’s army faced Muawiyah’s across the Euphrates plains, and
everyone on both sides knew the prophecy. Muawiyah knew it. His general Amr ibn
al-As knew it. Ammar ibn Yasir was on the other side of that battlefield, which
meant that whichever side killed Ammar was the rebellious group the Prophet had
warned about. This is the kind of prophetic mathematics that keeps military
commanders awake at three in the morning.
Ammar didn’t think about it that way. Or if he did, he didn’t
let it slow him down.
He was fasting that day, or perhaps just desperately thirsty—history
gets those details a little blurred, the way details at the edge of great
events get blurred. He asked for water, and someone brought him a bowl. Milk
mixed with water.
When he saw it, Ammar went very still.
The tears came. Just a few. Just enough.
“Allah and His Messenger spoke the truth,” he whispered.
They asked him what he meant, and he told them: the Prophet
had once said that his last drink in this world would be a sip of milk.
He drank it like a man who understands exactly what he’s
drinking. Reverently. Completely. The way you drink something when you know you
will not drink again.
Then this ninety-year-old man, this twice-orphaned son of
slaves, this man who had been tortured and dismissed and appointed and recalled
and who had carried two bricks when everyone else carried one—this man went
back into the battle like a young lion who has just remembered what it is to be
a lion.
Abu al-Adiya al-Mazini got him in the end. A spear, a fall
from the horse, the sand coming up to meet him the way sand always eventually
does.
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Some people, at the moment of their death, look surprised.
Ammar ibn Yasir did not look surprised.
He had known since Quba. He had known since a prophet wiped
the dust from his head and told him the truth, because that was the kind of man
the Prophet was—a man who told you the truth even when the truth was difficult,
especially when the truth was difficult, because he understood that people
deserve to know the shape of the story they’re living in.
Ammar’s parents were already there, waiting for him on the
other side of everything. His mother, who had spat in the face of a man with a
spear and called him a beetle. His father, who had traveled north looking for a
lost brother and found instead a destiny he could not have imagined.
A family. Reunited.
The rebellious group that killed him argued, afterward, that
the prophecy meant something else. That they couldn’t be the rebellious
group because they had their reasons, their justifications, their theological
frameworks. People who do terrible things always have frameworks. That’s one of
the things you learn, if you live long enough and watch carefully enough.
The sand took Ammar’s blood the way the sand had taken his
mother’s blood, thirty-some years before.
Without judgment. Without mercy.
Without any particular interest at all.
But the people watching—they remembered. They always
remembered. And they carried it forward, hand to hand, like a lamp in a dark
room, all the way to here.
All the way to you, reading this now.
Some stories don’t end. They just keep finding new people
to haunt.
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