247 — My father—may Allah have mercy on him—narrated to me, from an elder of Quraysh, who said: A client of ʿAmr ibn ʿUtba ibn Abī Sufyān said: ʿAmr ibn ʿUtba saw me with a man who was disparaging someone else. He said to me, “Woe to you!”—and he never said that to me before or afterward. “Keep your ears free from listening to foul speech, just as you keep your tongue free from uttering it, for the listener shares in the speaker’s guilt. The speaker merely selects the worst contents of his vessel and pours them into yours. Had you thrust the fool’s words back into his own mouth, the one who rejected them would have been blessed by them, just as the one who uttered them was made wretched by them.”