with his children, that you might watch over them, and watch over them you did—thus you spared (1) Adam the hardship of providing for his offspring.
Khalid wished to give him twenty thousand, yet he handed him forty thousand; he also ordered that he be lashed fifty times and that a crier announce: “This is the recompense of one who does not know the worth of poetry.”
Al-Asmaʿi narrates from him that he said, “A governor only bars himself from the people for one of three reasons: ineptitude, miserliness, or because he is screening a disgrace.”
ʿAbd Allah ibn Ahmad said, “I heard Ibn Maʿin say, ‘Khalid ibn ʿAbd Allah al-Qasri is an evil man; he speaks against ʿAli.’”
Fadl ibn al-Zubayr said, “I heard al-Qasri say about ʿAli things that it is unlawful even to mention.”
Al-Asmaʿi said, “I was told that al-Qasri disparaged Zamzam, saying, ‘People claim that Zamzam can neither be exhausted nor censured; yes, by Allah, it can be drained and censured. Besides, the Commander of the Faithful has brought you an aqueduct here in Mecca.’”
Abu ʿAsim al-Nabil said: “Khalid channelled water into Mecca, set up a basin beside Zamzam, and declared, ‘I have brought you sweet water unlike the mother of beetles’—meaning Zamzam.”
I heard ʿUmar ibn Qays say: “When Khalid ibn ʿAbd Allah seized Saʿid ibn Jubayr and Ṭalq ibn Ḥabib, he spoke from the pulpit: ‘It seems you object to what I have done. By Allah, were the Commander of the Faithful to write to me, I would demolish it stone by stone’—meaning the Kaʿbah.”
Al-Asmaʿi said: “I heard Shabib ibn Shaybah relate: ‘The reason Khalid was deposed was that a woman complained to him, “Your Magian slave forced me into fornication and violated me.” He asked her, “How did you find his foreskin?” Ḥassan al-Nabaṭi reported the incident to Hisham, who then dismissed Khalid.’”
Khalid once preached: “You insist that I exact retribution from one of my captains. If I exact it from him, I must exact it from myself; if I do that, then the Commander of the Faithful must exact it from himself; and if he does so, then the Messenger of Allah must exact it from himself—and were he to do that, retribution would indeed be taken, right here, right here,” as he gestured with his hand.