Day 8

The lesson

1. He gave his own food to the needy, the orphan and the captive (76:8), and the verse of those who give their wealth by night and day, secretly and openly (2:274) is said to concern the four dirhams he gave in those four ways (Sharh Nahj al-Balagha of Ibn Abi l-Hadid). He ate barley bread from a sealed bag so that no one would soften it with oil, and wore the coarsest clothes, while the wealth of the state passed through his hands.
2. At dawn on 19 Ramadan 40 AH, in the mosque of Kufa, the Kharijite Abd al-Rahman ibn Muljam al-Muradi struck him with a poisoned sword; he was martyred on 21 Ramadan, at sixty-three (al-Irshad of al-Shaykh al-Mufid). He told his sons to strike his killer only once and not to mutilate him, and his last counsel was the Qur'an, the prayer, the orphans and the neighbours (Nahj al-Balagha).
3. Al-Hasan, al-Husayn, Muhammad ibn al-Hanafiyya and Abdullah ibn Ja'far buried him secretly at al-Ghariyyayn, today's Najaf, so that the Umayyads and the Kharijites could not desecrate his grave; it stayed hidden until Imam al-Sadiq made it known (al-Irshad; Farhat al-Ghari of Ibn Tawus; al-Gharat of al-Thaqafi). His sermons, letters and sayings were gathered by al-Sharif al-Radi in Nahj al-Balagha.

Questions

Questions are written by AI from the lesson’s facts, and each answer was checked against its fact.