and as for your remark, “The rightful claimant spurns excuse,” there is no hand between you and Allah to hold you back—so do as you please.

Muʿāwiyah exclaimed, “What a disgrace! State your needs.” (1)

Abū Tumaylah—Yahya ibn Wāḍiḥ—relates: A man from the descendants of al-Ḥārith ibn al-Ṣimmah, known as Abū ʿUthmān, informed us that Caesar sent word to Muʿāwiyah: “Send me the trousers of the tallest man among the Arabs.” Muʿāwiyah therefore said to Qays ibn Saʿd, “It seems we shall have to ask for your trousers.”

Qays rose, stepped aside for a moment, then returned and threw them down. Muʿāwiyah said, “Could you not have gone home first and then sent them?” Qays replied in verse:

I wished by this that people all might know
These are Qays’s trousers, while delegates look on,
Lest anyone claim: “Qays is gone, and these are
The breeches of some ʿĀdī man, a son of Thamūd.”
I am a chieftain of the noble Yemeni clan;
Among mankind there are but leader and led.
So measure them on one my size—for a man like me
Is daunting, and my frame among men is long.

Muʿāwiyah then summoned the tallest soldier in the army; the trousers were pulled up on him until they reached his nose—yet still they trailed on the ground. (2)

This account is also transmitted through another chain.

Al-Wāqidī and others state that Qays died toward the end of Muʿāwiyah’s caliphate.

22 – ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib ibn Rabīʿah ibn al-Ḥārith al-Hāshimī (M, D, S, T)
A grandson of ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib ibn Hāshim al-Hāshimī and the father of Muḥammad.