Abū Ḥātim al-Sijistānī relates—through Abū ʿUbaydah—that Muʿāwiyah said:
“I had already placed my foot in the stirrup and was on the verge of fleeing on the Day of Ṣiffīn, but only the verses of Ibn al-Iṭnaba held me back:
My honor forbade it, so did my past exploits,
And my quest to purchase praise at a splendid price;
My forcing my soul to face what it dislikes,
And my blow upon the crown of the forward-thrusting hero;
And my word, whenever the heart trembles and surges:
‘Hold your ground—be thanked, or take your ease.’ (1)
Al-Awzāʿī said: A man once asked al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī about ʿAlī and ʿUthmān. He replied, “Each of them possessed early merit, each of them possessed kinship; this one was tried while that one was spared.”
The man then asked him about ʿAlī and Muʿāwiyah. He answered, “Each had kinship, but only one of them—ʿAlī—had prior merit, while the other had none, and both were put to trial.”
I say: Roughly sixty thousand were killed between the two camps; some say seventy thousand. ʿAmmār was slain while fighting alongside ʿAlī, and the people recognized the Messenger of Allah’s saying, “The aggressive faction will kill him.” (2)
(1) The report together with the verses is cited by Ibn Asakir, 16/357 b; the verses also appear in al-Wahshiyyat, 77; al-Ikhtiyaran, 159–160; ‘Uyun al-Akhbar, 1/126; and al-‘Iqd al-Farid, 1/104–105. See further Simt al-Laali, 574.
Ibn al-Attanaba is ‘Amr b. ‘Amir b. Zayd Manat al-Khazraji, a poet-warrior of the pre-Islamic era. Al-Attanaba is his mother’s epithet—she was the daughter of Shihab of Banu al-Qayn—and the word attanaba designates a secondary strap that steadies a loose girth, or a cord used to reinforce the string of an Arab bow.
A biographical notice on him is found in al-Marzubani, Muʿjam al-Shu‘ara, 203–204.
(2) The hadith is sound, widely known, indeed mass-transmitted (mutawatir). Unable to deny it, Muawiya claimed—according to the Musnad, 2/161, with an authentic chain—that “the very people who brought him are the ones who killed him.” ‘Ali replied, “By that logic the Messenger of Allah killed Hamza when he sent him out.” This was an unanswerable rejoinder and an irrefutable proof.
The author’s view that Muawiya’s contingent was the rebellious party (al-baghiya) is shared by the jurists of both Hijaz and Iraq, from the schools of hadith and of legal reasoning alike—among them Malik, al-Shafi‘i, Abu Hanifa, al-Awza‘i and others—as noted by the imam ‘Abd al-Qahir al-Jurjani in his book al-Imama, cited by al-Manawi in Fayd al-Qadir, 6/663.