ʿĀṣim ibn ʿAmr (1), after fierce fighting. Its frontier outposts were extensive and its territories far-flung (2), stretching from Sind to the River Balkh, and from those border points and mountain passes they used to contend with the people of Qandahār and the Turks. He also recorded the conquest of Makrān at the hands of al-Ḥakam ibn ʿAmr, whom he reinforced with Shihāb ibn al-Mukhāriq ibn Shihāb, Suhayl ibn ʿAdī, and ʿAbd Allah ibn ʿAbd Allah (3). They engaged the king of Sind, and Allah routed the hosts of Sind; the Muslims carried off abundant spoils. Al-Ḥakam ibn ʿAmr wrote announcing the victory and sent the one-fifths with Ṣuḥār al-ʿAbdī.
When he reached ʿUmar, the latter asked him about the land of Makrān. He replied:
“O Commander of the Believers, its plain is a mountain, its water is a mere trickle (4); its dates (5) are daqal—the poorest kind (6); its enemy is a formidable fighter. Its good is scant and its evil prolonged; what is plentiful there is meagre, and what is meagre is wasted, and what lies beyond it is even worse.”
ʿUmar said, “Are you speaking in rhymed prose or conveying information?” He answered, “No—rather, I am informing.” So ʿUmar wrote to al-Ḥakam ibn ʿAmr instructing him not to campaign any further into Makrān and to confine himself to the lands on this side of the river.
Al-Ḥakam ibn ʿAmr composed the following (7) [in the wāfir metre]:
The widows have eaten their fill—with no boast in that—
from booty that came to them out of Makrān;
It reached them after hunger and distress
when winter’s hearths were barren of smoke.
Never will the army censure what I have done,
nor will my sword be blamed, nor yet my tongue (8);
On the morn I drove back (9) the rabble, repelling them
toward the wide plains of Sind and its strongholds;
The river Mehrān served us in all we desired—
obedient, its reins never slackened (10);
Had my commander not forbidden it,
we would have crossed it to the distant, scattered lands of the Zawānī.
[The Raid on the Kurds]
Ibn Jarīr (11) likewise related, with his chain through Sayf from his teachers, that a band of Kurds assembled, and that a faction of