The Martyrdom of Khubayb and Zayd in Makkah

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

Khubayb ibn ʿAdī and Zayd ibn al-Dathinnah were taken to Mecca and sold to families who each held a personal blood grievance from Badr. Khubayb had killed a man of Banū al-Ḥārith, who purchased him for revenge; Zayd had been among those who killed Umayyah ibn Khalaf, the man who had tortured Bilāl ibn Abī Rabāḥ in Mecca, and was purchased by Umayyah's son, Ṣafwān ibn Umayyah, for the same purpose.

❧KHUBAYB'S EXECUTION

Held captive until the day set for his death, Khubayb asked to be allowed a ghusl and a razor to remove his body hair, so as to meet Allah in a state of cleanliness. While he held the razor, a young child of the household crawled up beside him; the mother, seeing this from a distance, cried out in terror that he might harm the boy in retaliation. Khubayb was taken aback that she could think such a thing of him and told her plainly he would never do such a thing. She later said she had never encountered a prisoner of finer character, and described watching him, while held captive and starved, eating from bunches of grapes, though no grapes existed anywhere in Mecca at that time of year: a karāmah, sustenance provided by Allah alone.

Before his execution, Khubayb asked to pray two rakʿahs. He explained afterward that he would have prayed longer had he not been concerned it would be read as fear of death. This act established what became the Sunnah of praying two rakʿahs before an execution, an ijtihād of a Companion later accepted into the practice of the religion.

❧ZAYD'S EXECUTION AND ABU SUFYAN'S QUESTION

Zayd's execution, arranged by Ṣafwān ibn Umayyah, was treated by the people of Mecca as a public spectacle. As he was about to be killed, Abū Sufyān put a direct question to him: "I ask you by Allah, don't you wish right now that Muḥammad (ﷺ) were in your place, and you were safe at home with your family?" With nothing left to gain or lose by any answer, Zayd told him plainly that he would rather die exactly as he was about to than have the Prophet (ﷺ) suffer so much as the prick of a thorn in his place. Abū Sufyān later remarked that he had never seen any leader loved by his people the way Muḥammad (ﷺ) was loved by his Companions, an observation preserved not from the Companions themselves but from a hostile witness at the time, later a convert himself.