into three parts, and He placed me in the best third of it. Then He chose the Arabs from among humankind; He chose Quraysh from among the Arabs; He chose Banū Hāshim from among Quraysh; He chose the children of ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib from among Banū Hāshim; and finally He chose me from among the children of ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib.” This ḥadith is classified as mursal.

Zahr ibn Ḥiṣn narrated—from his grandfather Ḥumayd ibn Minhab—who said: I heard my grandfather Khuraym ibn Aws ibn Ḥārithah say, “I emigrated to the Messenger of Allah ﷺ on his return from Tabūk. I heard al-ʿAbbās say, ‘Messenger of Allah, I should like to compose verses in your praise.’ He replied, ‘May Allah never let your teeth break.’ Thereupon al-ʿAbbās recited:

Before that time you were already pure in the shade—
in the secure place where leaves were sewn together;
Then you came down to the lands, yet you were neither human,
nor a morsel of flesh, nor a clot of blood;
Rather, a drop of seed aboard the Ship,
while Nusr and his people were held back by drowning;
Carried from loin to womb—
whenever one age passed, another age appeared—
Until your august House, the Protector’s House, was embraced
by Khindif’s loftiest lineage, beneath which belts are bound;
And when you were born, the earth shone bright,
and the horizon glittered with your light.
In that radiance we still advance,
cleaving the paths of guidance within its illumination.

al-ẓilāl (the shade) refers to the shade of Paradise, as in Allah’s statement: “Indeed, the righteous will be amid shade and springs” (Qur’an 77:41). al-mustawdaʿ (the secure place) is the spot where Adam and Eve used to fasten leaves together over themselves, meaning they overlapped the leaves to cover themselves. The poet then says, “Then you descended to the world in Adam’s loins while you were neither a human being nor a morsel of flesh.”

His words “aboard the Ship” mean that the Prophet’s seed was in the loins of Noah. Ṣālib is an uncommon dialectal form of ṣulb (loins); both damma and fatḥa are permissible in ṣulb, just as with saqm and saqam.

al-ṭabaq means a generation: each time an age and a generation passed, another generation arrived, and because a century—