Allah has proclaimed:
“I have sent forth a servant
who tells the truth—there is nothing hidden in what he says.
Allah has proclaimed:
“I have set an army on the march—
the Helpers, ever poised for the encounter.” (1)
Day after day they face the sons of Maʿad—
whether with abuse, with battle, or with biting satire. (2)
Can the one among you who reviles Allah’s Messenger
be equal to the one who praises and supports him?
Gabriel, Allah’s messenger, is with us;
the Holy Spirit has no equal. (3)
Abū al-Ḍuḥā narrated—on the authority of Masrūq—who said:
“I was with ʿĀʾishah when Ḥassān, after he had gone blind, came in and recited:
‘Chaste and dignified, never tainted by suspicion,
yet she wakes up ravenous for the flesh of the unwary.’
She replied, ‘But you are not like that.’
I said to her, ‘Do you allow him in, even though Allah has said, “And the one who shouldered the chief responsibility for it shall have a tremendous punishment” (Q 24:11)?’
She answered, ‘And what—’
= al-khumr (plural of khimar): the cloth with which a woman covers her head. Ibn Durayd reports in his Jamharah that al-Khalil used to cite the couplet:
Our chargers remain rain-soaked, *
The women darken them with their khumr
He rejects the variant talutimuhunna and explains the line as meaning that the women shake the dust from the horses with their veils. The verb is derived from talm, used for striking a flatbread to remove the ashes clinging to it.
(1) That is, its aspiration and constant habit is to meet the knights in combat. The Arabs say: “A camel is urdah for travel,” meaning fit and strong for it, and “So-and-so is urdah for evil,” meaning able to bear it.
(2) This is the wording of the base manuscript. Al-Tabarani (no. 3582) reads talaqi; with that reading the verse shows iqwaʾ (an irregular rhyme). The version found in Muslim and in the Diwan reads:
Every day we, the sons of Maʿadd, *
trade in insults, fighting, or satire.
His phrase lana (“for us”) refers to us, the Ansar.
(3) The report together with the poem is transmitted by Muslim (no. 2490) and al-Tabarani (no. 3582). The verses also appear in Diwan Hassan 1/17-18; Ibn Hisham’s Sira 2/421, 424; al-Suhayli 2/280; Ibn Sayyid al-Nas 2/181; and Tahdhib Ibn Asakir 4/130-131.