Muhammad ibn ʿAwn related—on the authority of Ibn ʿUyaynah—that al-Maʾmun was once sitting in audience when a woman approached him and said, “My brother has died and left six hundred dinars, yet they have given me only one dinar, saying, ‘This is your share of the estate.’”
Al-Maʾmun did the calculation and said, “The deceased must have left four daughters.”
She replied, “Yes.”
He said, “Their allotted share is four hundred dinars.⦗1⦘”
She answered, “Yes.”
He continued, “He also left a mother—her portion is one hundred dinars—and a wife who receives seventy-five dinars. By Allah, do you have twelve brothers?”
She said, “Yes.”
He said, “Then each brother receives two dinars, and you receive one.⦗2⦘”
Ibn al-Aʿrabi said: Al-Maʾmun once asked me, “Explain the verse recited by Hind bint ʿUtbah:
‘We are the daughters of Ṭāriq;
we walk upon brocaded cushions.’
Who is this Ṭāriq?”
I searched through her lineage and found no such ancestor, so I replied, “I do not know.”
He said, “She meant the star (al-najm); she claimed descent from it on account of her beauty.⦗3⦘” He then slid toward me a lump of ambergris, which I later sold for five thousand dirhams.⦗4⦘
(1) The original manuscript reads: “lahuma” (“for both of them”).
(2) Safadi, Fawat al-Wafayat, vol. 2, p. 236; Suyuti, Tarikh al-Khulafa, p. 315.
(3) This explanation would hold only if the poem were truly by Hind bint Utbah, but the correct view is that it is not hers. She merely quoted it on the day of Uhud to incite the polytheists against the Prophet. The author is Hind bint Bayada b. Riyah b. Tariq al-Ayadi; she composed it when the Iyad tribe confronted the Persian army in al-Jazira. Iyad’s leader at the time was Bayada b. Riyah, making Tariq—named in the poem—her grandfather. The word banat is transmitted both in the nominative and the accusative: the nominative treats it as the predicate of an implicit subject, whereas the accusative is for eulogy or specification, with the predicate supplied by her next line, namshi (“we march”). The poem continues:
“The musk is on our hair, / and pearls upon our throats; / If you advance, we embrace you / and spread out brocaded cushions; / But if you turn away, we part— / a parting devoid of affection.”
See al-Baghdadi, Sharh Abyat Mugni al-Labib, 6/188-190; al-Fakhir, p. 23; and al-Suhayli, al-Rawd al-Unuf, 3/161.
(4) Suyuti, Tarikh al-Khulafa, p. 319.