ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Jubayr ibn Nufayr—on the authority of his father—recounted:
“I said to al-Ḥasan, ‘People claim that you want the caliphate.’
He replied, ‘The very heads of the Arabs were once in my hand: they would make peace with whomever I made peace, and wage war against whomever I fought. I abandoned that power for the sake of Allah—shall I now snatch it back with the billy-goats of the Ḥijāz (1)?’

Al-Ṭayālisī narrated this in his Musnad, through Shuʿbah, from Yazīd ibn Khumayr; on one occasion he transmitted it as “from ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Numayr, from his father.” Ibn Abī Ḥātim said in al-ʿIlal (2): “This latter wording is the sounder.”

Qatādah reported that al-Ḥasan said to al-Ḥusayn, “I have been given poison more than once, but never anything like this; I am casting out pieces of my liver.” Al-Ḥusayn asked, “Who did it?” but he refused to tell him.

Al-Wāqidī related: ʿAbd Allah ibn Jaʿfar told us, on the authority of ʿAbd Allah ibn Ḥasan, who said:
“Al-Ḥasan married frequently; few wives attained special standing with him, and scarcely a woman married him without coming to love him and become enamoured of him.
“It is said that he was poisoned and recovered, then poisoned again and recovered, until the final occasion when death approached. The physician declared, ‘This is a man whose intestines have been severed by poison.’
“I also heard some people say that Muʿāwiyah had discreetly persuaded one of his servants to give him poison.”

Abū ʿAwānah—through Mughīrah, from Umm Mūsā—reported that Jaʿdah bint al-Ashʿath ibn