Islam. Yet Ibn Isḥāq adds: “If Ḥamzah truly said that, then it is as he stated, for he never spoke except the truth. Allah knows best which of the two banners was first. According to what we have heard from our own scholars, however, ʿUbaydah’s was the first.”
The ode reads:
Alas, my people—how forbearance is confused with ignorance,
how counsel and good sense are diminished among men!
For those who ride out with wrongdoing, we have not trespassed
upon their inviolable rights—neither herd nor household.
It is as though we had ruined them, yet no ruin reached them from us
save a summons to chastity and to justice.
A call to embrace Islam they will not accept;
they treat it as though it were some idle jest.
They would not desist until I undertook a raid against them
wherever they encamped, seeking the solace of virtue,
by order of the Messenger of Allah, beneath the very first banner
ever to flutter—no banner had been raised before mine—
a standard whose victory comes from the Most Honoured,
the Mighty God, whose deed surpasses every deed.
On the evening they marched, fully massed, while within each of us
the cauldrons of our comrades’ anger were boiling.
When we came into view, they knelt and hobbled their mounts;
we hobbled ours at the range of an arrow’s flight.
We said to them, “The rope of Allah is our support,
whereas you have no rope save that of error.”
Then Abu Jahl rose there as an aggressor;
his plot failed and Allah foiled the scheme of Abu Jahl.
We were but thirty riders, while they were two hundred
with one man more as surplus.
O sons of Lu’ayy, do not obey your misleaders;
return to Islam and the straight, easy way.
For I fear a punishment will be poured upon you,
and you will cry out in regret and bereavement.
He (Ibn Hishām) relates: Abu Jahl ibn Hishām—may Allah curse him—replied:
I marvel at the causes of anger and ignorance,
at those who stir up discord and falsehood,
and at those who abandon what we found our forefathers upon—
men of lineage and joyous nobility…
He then recited the remainder of the poem.
Ibn Hishām comments: The majority of scholars versed in poetry reject both of these odes—the one attributed to Ḥamzah and the one attributed to Abu Jahl, may Allah curse him.
[The Expedition of Buwaṭ toward Raḍwā]
Ibn Isḥāq narrates: Thereafter, in the month of Rabīʿ al-Awwal—namely, in the second year—the Messenger of Allah set out on campaign against Quraysh.