Sometime in the year 184 or 185 of the Hijrī calendar (i.e. 800 or 801 ce), a Muslim scholar named Wakīʿ b. al-Jarrāḥ was travelling in the city of Mecca. While there, Wakīʿ reported ḥadīths to some listeners: a well-known practice among many eighth- and ninth-century Muslims, who related oral reports about the Prophet Muḥammad and his Companions in order to learn about the practices and stories of the primordial Islamic community. One of Wakīʿ's traditions, though, did not invoke a witty saying of the Prophet, describe how he had performed a particular ritual, or narrate the past glories of battles fought by the early Muslims. Instead, Wakīʿ's narrated tradition described in graphic detail what had happened to the Prophet's body after his death: ‘When the Messenger of God died, he was not buried until his belly swelled up and his little finger bent.’ According to this short tradition, the Prophet Muḥammad's corpse was not buried until signs of decay had already begun to appear on the body, with his belly swelling from collected fluids and his finger bent from rigor mortis.

The context for Wakīʿ's reporting of this particular ḥadīth goes unrecorded, and our sources differ on what happened next. But, whatever the case, Wakīʿ's report about the Prophet's corpse got him into a rather sticky situation. According to one version of these events, when the governor of Mecca heard what Wakīʿ had said about the Prophet, he imprisoned Wakīʿ and planned to kill him, going so far as to build a platform to carry out a public execution. With Wakīʿ in dire trouble, his colleague, the respected scholar Sufyān b. ʿUyayna, interceded with the Meccan governor, noting that Wakīʿ was a well-connected man whose family would complain to the caliph in Baghdad. Seeing the complications that this case might cause him, the governor relented and freed Wakīʿ, who promptly fled to Medina. However, Wakīʿ's words about the Prophet had preceded him to Medina, where a group planned to reverse the Meccan governor's leniency and stone Wakīʿ to death. Catching wind of this plot while on the road, Wakīʿ deviated from his planned route and retreated homewards to Kūfa in Iraq.