Something he could check

Adiyy arrived expecting, presumably, to be received as a chief. What happened instead is that he was taken to a house, and on the way the Prophet ﷺ was stopped by an old woman who kept him standing in the road for a long time over some matter of her own.

Adiyy said afterwards that he thought at that point: this is not a king.

At the house he was given the one cushion to sit on. The Prophet ﷺ sat on the ground.

Then he was told what was stopping him. Adiyy was a Christian who took a portion of his tribe's spoils, which his own religion did not permit him. He had not expected that to be known.

And then he was given three things that were going to happen — not doctrines, but predictions, of a kind that can be checked.

That poverty would become so general that a man would look for someone to take his charity and find nobody. That the treasures of the Persian emperor would be opened. And that a woman would travel alone from Hirah to the Ka'bah, on her own, fearing nobody but Allah.

That last one is the striking one, because at the time it was close to absurd. Hirah to Makkah is a very long way across territory whose whole economy included robbing travellers — Adiyy's own tribe among them.

He accepted Islam.

And he lived a long time. The report has him saying afterwards that he had seen the woman make that journey, and that he had been among those who opened the Persian treasuries — and that he expected the third.

This is the same promise Khabbab was given during the persecution in Makkah, when he asked when it would stop. Two men, decades apart, one enslaved and one a Christian chief, told the same specific thing. Adiyy is the one who reports checking it.