The Prophet's Prediction for Ammar ibn Yasir

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

While overseeing the digging, the Prophet ﷺ noticed ʿAmmār ibn Yāsir working with twice the energy of everyone around him, consistent with ʿAmmār's known intensity as a young man shaped by witnessing the martyrdom of both his parents in Makkah. Seeing him exhausted, dust-covered, and hungry from the effort, the Prophet ﷺ said to him: "May Allah have mercy on you, O ʿAmmār, al-fi'ah al-bāghiyah (تَقْتُلُكَ الْفِئَةُ الْبَاغِيَةُ, the transgressing group) will kill you," meaning a group that would step outside the bounds of legitimate authority.

Scholars record this prediction in connection with either the digging of the Prophet's ﷺ mosque or the digging of the Trench, some conclude the two accounts describe a single event misattributed in transmission, others that the Prophet ﷺ repeated the prediction on both occasions.

The prophecy was fulfilled decades later at the Battle of Ṣiffīn, when ʿAmmār, by then an elderly man fighting on the side of ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib, whom Ahl al-Sunnah consider to have been closer to the truth in that conflict, was struck and killed by an arrow from the forces of Muʿāwiyah, who had made his own sincere ijtihād in the matter and is not held blameworthy for it. ʿAlī's supporters took ʿAmmār's death as confirmation of their position, recalling this very prediction. Dr. Qadhi notes the Prophet's ﷺ precise wording, describing Muʿāwiyah's side as merely "transgressing" (bāghiyah) rather than disbelieving or evil, as reflecting the nuanced Sunni position that the conflict was a dispute over legitimate authority between two sincere, rightly-guided Companions, not a matter of one side being righteous and the other corrupt.