The previous chapter began with the story of a dubiously Jewish, Christian and/or Muslim man's attempted theft of the Maqām Ibrāhīm. As we saw, the Maqām Ibrāhīm represented Islamic claims to both continuity with and difference from earlier Near Eastern religious communities. This chapter begins with another relic story, but one which largely inverts the scheme of George stealing the Maqām Ibrāhīm. Instead of an (ambiguously) non-Muslim man failing to abduct an Islamic relic, this story narrates a group of Muslims successfully moving a relic of the Jewish and Christian past: the corpse of the prophet Daniel. But rather than displaying this prophetic relic as a symbol of victory or monotheistic supremacy, the conquering Muslim army hides Daniel's corpse, seemingly to get rid of it forever.

The story of Daniel's corpse is set in the 640s ce during the siege of al-Sūs, a city in the Persian province of Khūzistān, amid the Muslim conquest of the Sassanian Empire. An early account appears in an anonymous East Syrian (i.e. Nestorian) record – now conventionally called the Khūzistān Chronicle – of late Sasanian and early Islamic history:

According to this Syriac Christian text, the Muslim army took as spoil a biblical prophet's body, allegedly preserved since the days of the ancient Persian kings. In this very early account of the conquest of Khūzistān, we see Muslims quite interested in a prophet's body. Taking the corpse away as a prize alongside other treasure, the Muslims here arguably participate in a form of relic translation: just the sort of activity that led to George's beheading when he tried to steal the Maqām Ibrāhīm from Mecca.