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"My judgment is that the men shall be put to death, the women and children sold into slavery, and the spoil divided among the army." Mahomet was exultant at the sentence. "Truly the judgment of Sa'ad is the judgment of God pronounced on high from beyond the seventh Heaven."
The Disaffected, it is true, remained sufficiently at variance with him to resent, though impotently, his severity towards the Koreitza, and to declare that Sa'ad ibn Muadh's death, which occurred soon after, was the direct result of his bloody judgment. But their resentment was confined to speech. The Meccans had retired discredited, and were unlikely to attack again for some time at least.
What foundation there may have been for these charges is uncertain; but it seems that Omar was persuaded, towards the close of A.D. 640, or very early in A.D. 641, that they were of sufficient weight to make it necessary that they should be investigated. He accordingly recalled Sa'ad from his government to Medina, and replaced him at Kufa by Ammar Ibn Yaser.
Of these five years spent among the Beni Sa'ad chroniclers have spoken in much detail, but their confused accounts are so interwoven with legend that it is impossible to re-create events, and we can only obtain a general idea of his life as a tiny child among the children of the tribe, sharing their fortunes, playing and quarrelling with them, and at moments, when the spirit seemed to advance beyond its dwelling-place, gazing wide-eyed upon the limitless desert under the blaze of sun or below the velvet dark, with swift, half-conscious questionings uttering the universal why and how of childhood.
Sa'ad, on learning his movement, sent a body of troops in pursuit, which came up with the rear-guard of the Persians, and cut it in pieces, but effected nothing really important. Isdigerd made good his retreat, and in a short time concentrated at Holwan an army of above 100,000 men.
This name, no doubt, originally applied only to the vast inner space surrounded by the Iron Mountains, seems to have come to be that of Jannati Shahr itself, when spoken of by its inhabitants. The gigantic executioner the strangler named Sa'ad, seized Abd el Rahman by the right arm. Musa, his tar-hued companion, gripped him by the left.
"He shouted to us," says Burton, "'Defend yourself if you don't wish to be the meat of the Maghrabis! and to the enemy 'Dogs and sons of dogs! now shall you see what the children of the Arab are. 'I am Omar of Daghistan! 'I am Abdullah the son of Joseph! 'I am Sa'ad the Demon! we exclaimed." And, Burton, with his turbulent blood well stirred, found himself in the seventh heaven.
Hormuzan became an Arab pensionary, and shortly afterwards embraced Islamism. His territories were occupied by the Moslems, whose dominions were thereby extended from the Kuran to the Tab river. The Arab conquests on the side of Persia had hitherto been effected and maintained by the presiding genius of one of the ablest of the Mohammedan commanders, the victor of Kadi-siyeh, Sa'ad Ibn Abi Wakas.
"An there be one who shares with me her love, * I'd strangle Love tho' life by Love were slain Saying, O Soul, Death were the nobler choice, * For ill is Love when shared 'twixt partners twain." Then he repeated to the slave, "Smite her, O Sa'ad!"
About the time of Mahomet's birth a famine fell upon the Beni Sa'ad, which left nothing of all their stores, and the women of the tribe journeyed, weary and stricken with hunger, into the city of Mecca that they might obtain foster-children whose parents would give them money and blessings if they could but get their little ones taken away from that unhealthy place.
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