Sahih Ibn Hibban 5260

Translation

✧ The Messenger of Allah ﷺ dispatched us and appointed Abu 'Ubaydah b. al-Jarrah as our commander to meet a caravan of Quraysh. He provisioned us with a sack of dates, finding nothing else for us. Abu 'Ubaydah would feed us one date at a time. I said, 'How did you manage with it?' He said, 'We would suck it as a child sucks, then drink water over it, and it sufficed us for our day until night. And we would beat the leaves of the mimosa flava tree with our sticks, then moisten them with water and eat them.' Then we set out, and there appeared to us on the seashore something like a huge sand dune. We came to it and found it was a creature called the sperm whale. Abu 'Ubaydah said, 'It is carrion.' Then he said, 'No, we are the messengers of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, in the path of Allah, and you have been compelled by necessity, so eat.' We stayed with it for a month, and we were three hundred, until we grew fat. I saw us scooping fat from its eye socket with large vessels, and cutting pieces from it like an ox or the size of an ox. Abu 'Ubaydah took thirteen men from us and seated them in its eye socket. He took one of its ribs and stood it upright, then saddled the largest camel we had, and it passed under it. We provisioned ourselves with its meat and strips of dried meat. When we came to Madinah, we went to the Messenger of Allah ﷺ and told him about that. He said, 'It is provision that Allah brought out for you. Do you have any of its meat with you to feed us?' So we sent some of it to him, and he ate it.

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