Ali ibn Abi Talib and the Unfinished Building

Musannaf Ibn Abi Shaybah preserves a report about Ali ibn Abi Talib, may Allah be pleased with him, as he passed through an area associated with the tribe of Murad. A house was being built there. The scene begins simply, with construction in progress and Ali passing near the structure.

While he was passing, a piece of brick or other building material fell from the house and struck him. The report says that his head was wounded. Nothing in the account describes an attacker or a deliberate assault; the injury occurs in connection with the building work itself.

After being injured, Ali is reported to have prayed that the building would not be completed. The source does not preserve a longer spoken formula for the supplication, so the event is best told in the same concise form: he was wounded by the falling material and then prayed concerning the completion of the structure.

The unusual outcome follows immediately in the report. It says that no further brick was placed upon the building after that and that the structure remained unlike the completed houses around it. In the narrated sequence, the construction that had been underway came to a halt after Ali's supplication.

This episode is found in Musannaf Ibn Abi Shaybah, report 32805. Ibn Abi al-Dunya later preserved the same event in Mujabu al-Da'wa, and al-Lalaka'i included it among reports concerning the karamat of Ali. Ibn Asakir and Ibn Kathir also preserved the story in later classical works.

The account therefore has a clear and compact shape: Ali ibn Abi Talib passes a building under construction, falling material wounds his head, he prays that the building not be completed, and the report says the construction then remained unfinished. The location is kept only as the Murad-associated area mentioned by the sources, and the ending is kept within the period described by the report rather than extended into an unsupported claim about every later century.