Salman al-Farsi (Hazrat Salman Farsi, Salman the Persian) was the son of a Persian landowner. He kept his father's sacred fire, then left it. His father chained him; he escaped to Syria, followed a chain of Christian teachers across the late-antique Near East, was betrayed and sold into slavery in Arabia, and found what he was looking for in Madinah. This documentary tells his story from the sources themselves: where they are firm, where they disagree, and where they fall silent.

IN THIS FILM
• Two beginnings: Ram-Hurmuz or Isfahan? Why the two oldest accounts disagree
• The fire, the church on the road, and the escape to al-Sham
• A chain of teachers: al-Sham, Mosul, Nisibis and Amorium
• Betrayed by the merchants of Kalb and sold at Wadi al-Qura
• The three signs at Quba and in Yathrib
• Mukataba: 300 palms and 40 uqiyya, the price of his freedom
• The Battle of the Trench (Khandaq): what the earliest record says, and what later biographers added

HOW THIS FILM USES THE SOURCES
Every claim is labelled on screen: what the strongest hadith record says (Sahih al-Bukhari), what Salman's own long account says (Musnad Ahmad 23737, graded hasan), and what comes from the early biographers (Ibn Ishaq, Ibn Hisham, al-Waqidi, Ibn Sa'd). The painted scenes and moving shots are illustrative reconstructions made with AI image and video tools; the maps are built from real terrain data. The film shows no sacred figure and no one standing in for Salman.

CHAPTERS
00:00 Two beginnings: Rām-Hurmuz or Iṣfahān?
01:14 Part 1 · Two Beginnings: the dihqan's house and the fire
02:51 The church on the road
04:34 A direction: al-Shām
05:24 Part 2 · The Road West: confinement and escape
06:47 Al-Shām and the bishop's hoard
08:38 Death, discovery and a second teacher
10:42 Where next? Mosul
12:17 Part 3 · The Last Teacher: Mosul and Nisibis
14:44 ʿAmmūriya
16:04 The last words and the three signs
18:56 The merchants of Kalb
19:19 Part 4 · Sold at Wādī al-Qurā: the bargain
20:24 Wādī al-Qurā: what archaeology shows
21:31 Betrayed and sold
23:20 Yathrib recognised
24:26 News from Qubāʾ
26:14 Part 5 · The Three Signs: charity at Qubāʾ
27:20 The gift in Yathrib
28:04 Baqīʿ al-Gharqad: the third sign
30:01 Still enslaved: Badr and Uḥud
30:49 Mukātaba: 300 palms and 40 uqiyya
33:02 Part 6 · Freedom and the Trench: the planting
33:56 The gold, and freedom
34:53 The Trench: the record and the biographers
36:55 Later sources, and Salmān with Abu al-Dardāʾ
38:30 Where the record stops
40:01 Sources and credits

MAIN SOURCES
Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 1968, 2835, 2837, 3946, 3947, 4100, 4101, 4104, 6139 · Musnad Aḥmad 23737 (Risāla ed.) · Ibn Hishām, al-Sīra al-Nabawiyya · al-Wāqidī, al-Maghāzī · Ibn Saʿd, al-Ṭabaqāt · al-Ṭabarī, Tārīkh · al-Dhahabī, Siyar · Ibn Ḥajar, al-Iṣāba and Fatḥ al-Bārī · Qurʾān 24:33

PHOTOGRAPHS (Wikimedia Commons and The Met; changes: cropped)
The Portable Antiquities Scheme / Stuart Wyatt (CC BY 2.0) · Mehrab Pourfaraj (CC BY 2.0) · Behnam Minaei (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Institut français du Proche-Orient (Licence Ouverte) · Eugène Flandin (public domain) · Oystercard (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Timo Roller (CC BY 3.0) · Torsten62 (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Prof. Mortel (CC BY 2.0) · Ahmed Abdulbasit (CC BY-SA 4.0) · NASA (public domain) · The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Open Access)

Maps: relief from SRTM/GMTED (USGS) via AWS Terrain Tiles; Natural Earth; Cliopatria. Sound: recordings under the Pixabay Content License.

Flint & Folio: history, drawn from the record.


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