when, all of a sudden, I saw a figure riding on one of the locusts, clad in iron armor. Each time he waved his hand in a certain direction, the swarm tilted with his gesture while he repeated, “The world is nothing—nothing—nothing! All that it holds is nothing—nothing—nothing!”
Al-Awzaʿī said: “There was a man among us who used to go hunting on Friday without waiting for the Jumuʿah prayer; the earth swallowed him up together with his mule, and nothing of it was left except its two ears.”
Al-Awzaʿī (1) once walked out of the gate of the Beirut mosque. There was a man selling naṭif (2), and beside him another man selling onions who was chanting to his goods, “O onion, you are sweeter than honey!”—or he said, “Sweeter than the naṭif!” Al-Awzaʿī exclaimed, “Subḥān Allah! [Does this man think that any sort of lying is permissible? It is as though] (3) he sees no harm in lying.”
Al-Waqidī reported that al-Awzaʿī said, “We used to laugh and jest, but now that we have become imams whom people follow, we do not deem such behavior allowable; we must be watchful of ourselves.”
He once wrote to a brother: “To proceed: you have been encircled on every side, and you are being driven forward day and night. So fear Allah and the standing before Him, lest this be your final moment. Peace.”
Ibn Abī al-Dunyā (4) said: Muḥammad ibn Idrīs related to me; I heard Abū Ṣāliḥ, the scribe of al-Layth, recount from al-Hikl ibn Ziyād, from al-Awzaʿī that he preached and in his admonition said:
“O people! Draw strength from the favors in which you awake each morning so that you may flee from the kindled Fire of Allah that rises over the hearts. You dwell in a world whose stay is brief, and before long you will depart from it. You come after earlier generations who enjoyed the most delightful and radiant share of this life. They were longer-lived than you, stronger of body, loftier in ambition, and greater in wealth and children. They cut paths through the mountains, hewed the rocks in the valleys, and traveled through the lands, supported by mighty power and bodies like pillars. Yet it was only a matter of days and nights before time folded up their traces, ruined their homes and settlements, and erased their remembrance, so that, ‘Can you find a single one of them, or hear from them so much as a whisper?’ (Maryam 19:98). Secure in the amusement of long hopes, heedless of the appointed hour of their death, they returned as a people filled with regret. You know full well what befell them—Allah’s punishment striking them in the night—so that many of them awoke lying lifeless in their homes, while the survivors looked upon Allah’s favor in themselves and beheld the marks of His vengeance, the removal of His bounty from those who preceded them and were destroyed. By Allah, they gaze upon dwellings now empty and desolate, which were once surrounded by honor and famed for blessings, and to which hearts were attached.”