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At this the treasurer wept, till his beard was wet, whilst Asaad’s eyes filled with tears and he in turn repeated these verses:
Fate, when the thing itself is past, afflicteth with the trace, And weeping is not, of a truth, for body or form or face.[1]
What ails the nights?[2] May God blot out our error from the nights And may the hand of change bewray and bring them to disgrace!
They wreaked their malice to the full on Ibn ez Zubeir[3] erst, And on the House and Sacred Stone[4] his safeguard did embrace.
Would God, since Kharijeh[5] they took for Amrou’s sacrifice, They’d ransomed Ali with whome’er they would of all our race!
Then, with cheeks stained with thick-coming tears, he recited these also:
The days and nights are fashioned for treachery and despite; Yea, they are full of perfidy and knavish craft and sleight.
- ↑ i.e. but for the soul that animated them.
- ↑ The word “nights” (more commonly “days,” sometimes also “days and nights,” as in the verses immediately following) is constantly used in the sense of “fortune” or “fate” by the poets of the East.
- ↑ Abdallah ibn ez Zubeir revolted (A.D. 680) against Yezid (second Khalif of the Ommiade dynasty) and was proclaimed Khalif at Mecca, where he maintained himself till A.D. 692, when he was killed in the siege of that town by the famous Hejjaj, general of Abdulmelik, the fifth Ommiade Khalif.
- ↑ The allusion here appears to be to the burning of part of Mecca, including the Temple and Kaabeh, during the (unsuccessful) siege by Hussein, A.D. 683.
- ↑ Three Muslim sectaries (Kharejites), considering the Khalif Ali (Mohammed’s son-in-law), Muawiyeh (founder of the Ommiade dynasty) and Amr (or Amrou), the conqueror of Egypt, as the chief authors of the intestine discords which then (A.D. 661) ravaged Islam, conspired to assassinate them; but only succeeded in killing Ali, Muawiyeh escaping with a wound and the fanatic charged with the murder of Amr slaying Kharijeh, the chief of the police at Cairo, by mistake, in his stead. The above verses are part of a famous but very obscure elegy on the downfall of one of the Muslim dynasties in Spain, composed in the twelfth century by Ibn Abdoun el Andalousi, one of the most celebrated of the Spanish Arabic poets.
