Abu Afak: The Killing of a Hundred-Year-Old Poet — and the Report With No Chain

An Old Man, a Summer Night, and a Sword

It is a hot summer night in Medina, in the second year after the Hijra. An old man — the books say he had passed one hundred and twenty years — sleeps outside his house, in the open courtyard, the way old men slept on hot nights in that country. He is of the Banu Amr ibn Awf, and he is a poet. His weapon, his whole life, has been words. Somewhere in the darkness a man approaches, places a sword on the sleeping man's liver, and leans on it until the blade passes through into the bed beneath him. The old man screams once. By morning he is dead.

His name was Abu Afak. And for twelve centuries the argument has not been about whether the story is shocking. It has been about something much drier and much more important: whether the report has any chain of transmission at all.