Stoned Until He Fell Unconscious

Abū Dharr said, "I went into Makkah, and I asked the first man I saw in front of me. I told him, can you please guide me towards Muhammad (peace be upon him)?" He said that man immediately started calling the men of Quraysh, and they started pelting him with stones, rocks, whatever they could get their hands on, until he fell unconscious. He said, "By the time I woke up, I was like a naṣīb aḥmar." A naṣīb was one of the stone altars of Quraysh that they would slaughter and sacrifice their animals over, so it would be soaked with blood. That is the description Abū Dharr gave of himself: like a red sacrificial stone, soaked with blood from head to toe.

He said, "So I went to the well of Zamzam, I drank water, and I washed the blood off my body." And then he went next to the Kaʿbah, and the narration of Imam Aḥmad says that he stayed there for thirty days, not knowing where to meet the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him). And Abū Dharr said he didn't have any food for the entire period except for drinking the water of Zamzam. Physicians can apparently confirm that a person can survive by drinking water alone for quite a while, so this is perhaps not such a surprise. But the surprising thing is what comes next — Abū Dharr said, "And I started picking up weight, until I was getting folds on my stomach." The Bedouins typically had flat stomachs, and were very fit. Abū Dharr said he was gaining weight, and now the flesh on his stomach was folding — the kind of folding that appears at the stomach when a person sits down.