So your saying, “Who is this man?” can do him no harm; the Arabs know the one you refuse to recognize, and so do the non-Arabs.
[Whoever knows Allah knows this man’s precedence; from this household every nation has received its share of the religion.]

⦗1⦘ He said:
Hishām became furious at these verses and ordered that al-Farazdaq be jailed in ʿAsfān, a place between Mecca and Madinah. When the news reached ʿAlī ibn al-Ḥusayn, he sent al-Farazdaq twelve thousand dirhams and excused himself, saying that he had nothing else to give that day.
Al-Farazdaq returned the money, saying, “I composed what I composed for Allah—exalted is He—in support of the truth and in upholding the right of the Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, with respect to his descendants. I do not wish to take any recompense for it.”
ʿAlī ibn al-Ḥusayn then sent word to him, “Allah knows the sincerity of your intention in this, and I adjure you by Allah to accept it.” Al-Farazdaq accepted, and thereafter he satirized Hishām. Among what he said of him were these lines:

⦗2⦘
You imprison me between Madinah and that House
toward which repentant hearts of mankind yearn;
You wag a head that never was a chieftain’s head,
and two cross-eyed orbs whose defects are plain.

⦗3⦘ It has been related from ʿAlī ibn al-Ḥusayn that whenever a funeral passed by him he would recite these two verses:
We grow alarmed when the biers confront us,
yet the moment they pass we idle in diversion—
like the sudden scare of a flock assailed by a beast of prey;⦗4⦘
once he is gone, they return to their grazing.

The ḥāfiẓ Ibn ʿAsākir ⦗5⦘ reports, through Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd Allāh al-Muqriʾ, who said: Sufyān ibn ʿUyaynah narrated to us from al-Zuhrī, who said:
I heard ʿAlī ibn al-Ḥusayn, the Leader of the Devout, calling himself to account and confiding to his Lord:

O my soul! How long will the world still beguile you,⦗6⦘
how long will you lean toward its adornment?
Have you not taken lesson from forefathers now gone,
from the multitudes of kin whom the earth has enfolded,
from brothers whose loss once grieved you,
from peers who have been carried away to decay?⦗7⦘

They lie in the belly of the earth after treading upon its face;
their loveliness is lost in deserted valleys.
Their houses stand empty, their courtyards forlorn;
destiny herded them to the inescapable deaths.
They left the world and all they had amassed for it,
and burial-pits beneath the dust enclosed them.