Miracle 115: The Faith of a Person Changes at the Shrine

It is narrated to us by Abu Al-Hasan Ali Bin Al-Hasan Bin Al Hajjaj, he said,

‘We were seated in a gathering of the son of my uncle Abdullah Muhammad Bin Imran Bin Al- Hajjaj, and in it was a group from the people of Kufa, from the elders, and among the ones present was Al-Abbas Bin Ahmad Al-Abbasy.

While they were seated and discussing something, just then Ismail Bin Isa Al-Abbasy came to the gathering. When the group looked at him, they stopped from what they were discussing. Ismail sat near them and asked, ‘You have stopped your discussion due to my coming?’

Abu Al-Hassan who was the elder of the group seated there replied, ‘No, we have not withheld anything’.

Ismail said to them, ‘Know that Allah will be question me about what I am saying to you and what faith I believe in’ – to the extent that he swore with freeing his slave girls, and his slaves, and he testified that he did not believe except in the Wilayah of Imam Ali ibn Abi Talib (a.s.), and the Imams (a.s.) from his progeny and named them one by one.

Then the narrator continued their discussion, he said, ‘We were returning on the day of Friday after the prayes, from the central mosque, with my uncle Dawood. When we were near our house he said to us, ‘wherever you may be, come to me before the sunsets’.

We went to him at the end of the day, and he was seated, awaiting us. He said, ‘Shout for so and so, and so and so, from the workers (diggers)’.

Two men came to him with their tools, and he turned to us and said, ‘Gather together, along with the camel boy (there was a black slave) and and go to this grave which the people have been fascinated with and they are saying that it is the grave of Imam Ali (a.s.), exhume the grave and come to me with whatever is in it.

We went to the grave. We said, ‘Do what he has instructed. So, the diggers present said, ‘There is neither might nor strength except with Allah’ and started digging the grave till they descended in it upto five cubits. When they reached to the slabs, the diggers said, ‘We have reached to the place of slabs and we are not strong enough to break it’.

They sent down the Ethiopian. He took a pickaxe and struck a might hit; we could hear its severe resonance. Then he struck for a second time, and we heard a resonance severer than earlier. Then he struck for the third time, severer than earlier. Then we heard the slave shout. We stood up and looked at him, and we said to the ones who were with him, ‘What is the matter with him?’

He did not answer them, and he was crying for help. They tied him and extracted him with a rope, and there was blood upon his hands, from the ends of his fingers up to his elbow, and he was crying for help, neither speaking to us nor responding any answer. We put him on a mule and fled from there. The flesh of the slave was scattered, from his forearm and its sides, and the right hand had fractured, and we went to meet our uncle.

He said, ‘What happened?’ We told him what we had seen, and we narrated to him the incident. He turned to the Qiblah and repented from what he was upon, and he retracted from his earlier belief.¹

Footnotes

1. Behar al-Anwaar, Vol. 42, Chp 129, Trad 1 ↩