When al-Khayzurān was presented to al-Mahdī so that he might purchase her, he found nothing amiss in her except the slight thinness of her shanks. He therefore said to her, “Slave-girl, you are the very height of desire and beauty were it not for a certain sharpness in your legs (1).” She replied, “Commander of the Faithful, at the moment when you will most need them you will not be looking at them.” He admired her retort, bought her, and she enjoyed exceptional favor with him.

On one occasion al-Khayzurān performed the Hajj during al-Mahdī’s lifetime. While she was in Mecca he wrote to her, homesick and yearning for her, in these verses:
“We are in utmost bliss, yet—
Joy is complete only in your presence.
The single flaw, O people of my affection,
Is that you are absent while we are here.
So hasten your march; nay—if you are able—
Fly upon the winds, then fly!”

She replied—or had someone reply on her behalf—saying:
“The longing you described has reached us,
So that we almost flew, though we did not (2).
Would that the winds could bear to you
What the heart conceals within (3).
I have remained lovesick; and if, after my departure,
You are happy, may that happiness endure.”

It is related that Muḥammad ibn Sulaymān, the deputy governor of Basra whose death coincided with hers, once sent her one hundred slave-girls, each girl carrying a silver bowl (4) filled with musk. She wrote back: “If what you have sent is meant as the price of the good opinion we hold of you, our opinion of you exceeds what you have sent, and you have underpaid us; but if you intended it to increase affection, you have cast doubt upon my affection.” She returned the gift to him.

She bought the famous house in Mecca known as the House of al-Khayzurān and added its land to the Sacred Mosque. The annual revenue from her estates amounted to one million and sixty thousand. She died in Baghdad on the night of Friday, with three days remaining of Jumādā al-Ākhira of this year. Her son ar-Rashīd walked in her funeral procession, bearing her bier himself and hurrying through the mud. When he reached the cemetery, water was brought; he washed his feet, donned footwear, performed the funeral prayer over her, and descended into her grave. After coming up from the burial chamber, a couch was brought and he sat upon it, then summoned al-Faḍl ibn ar-Rabīʿ and entrusted to him the signet-ring and the expenditures.

Ar-Rashīd then recited the verses of Ibn Nuwayra, who had recited them when burying his own mother al-Khayzurān:
“For a while we were as Jadhīma’s two boon companions,
Until people said they would never part.
But when we were separated, it was as though I and Mālik—
Despite our long companionship—had not spent a single night together (5).”