QMI-INS-000a · c. 22 AH
Inscription of al-Ḥārith ibn Būlī: “the Time Abū Masʿūd Was Detained”
نقش الحارث بن بولي: زمن حُبس أبو مسعود
Darb Ḥismā, north-western Arabia
- أنا أبو الوليد الحـ[ا]رث
- فت[…] غلـ[ا]م عبد الله بن سبـ[ا]ع وكتب
- هذا زمن حُبس أبو مسعود
I am Abū l-Walīd al-Ḥārith, […] the young man (ghulām) of ʿAbdallāh ibn Sibāʿ, and he wrote this at the time Abū Masʿūd was detained.
The first of three graffiti by the same man, al-Ḥārith ibn Būlī, who dates each one by an event rather than by year ( QMI-INS-002a , QMI-INS-004b ). Here he is still the ghulām (young servant) of ʿAbdallāh ibn Sibāʿ, and he records that he wrote “at the time Abū Masʿūd was detained”.
The Desert Team identify Abū Masʿūd as the Companion ʿUqbah ibn ʿAmr, Abū Masʿūd al-Badrī, known by his kunya alone. They read the “detention” ( ḥabs ) not as imprisonment but as the restriction of movement that ʿUmar imposed on senior Companions in Medina, and connect it with Abū Masʿūd’s dispute with al-Mughīrah ibn Shuʿbah, governor of Kūfah, which Ibn Kathīr places in 22 AH. On that reasoning the text dates to about 22 AH, before ʿUmar’s death in 23 AH.
If the identification holds, this is the earliest Islamic inscription dated by an event, two years before the inscription of Zuhayr ( QMI-INS-001 ), which is dated by the death of ʿUmar in 24 AH. The date is the publishers’ inference from the historical sources; the stone itself gives no year. The second word of line 2 is damaged. The reading was first published in the Desert Team’s book Nuqūsh Ḥismā (2017).
Source: Desert Team (Farīq al-Ṣaḥrāʾ), “al-Taʾrīkh bi-l-ḥawādith fī al-nuqūsh al-islāmiyyah al-mubakkirah”, alsahra.org, 4 May 2018. Reading and dating by ʿAbdallāh ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Saʿīd. First published in Nuqūsh Ḥismā (Riyadh: Dār al-Majallah al-ʿArabiyyah, 2017).