and in every thing there is for Him a sign that points to the fact that He is One;
for Allah, in every stillness and in every motion, there is ever a witness to His being.
(1)

Then Abū Nuwās came by, read the lines, and exclaimed, “Excellent—may Allah combat him! By Allah, I would wish those verses were mine in exchange for all that I have ever recited. Whose are they?”
He was told, “They are Abū al-ʿAtāhiyah’s.”
So he took the notebook and wrote on its margin:
Glory be to Him who created mankind from a weak and lowly drop,
who conveys it from one lodging to a secure abode;
who causes it to turn, little by little, behind veils hidden from the eyes,
until movements appear—creatures brought forth out of stillness.
(2)

Among his most finely crafted verses are his words:
My days of excess are past; I now loathe diversions,
for grey hairs have shot calamities across my head.
Good sense forbade me, so I inclined toward fairness
and shrank from the censor’s reproach.
O heedless soul who admits his negligence,
on the Day of Return no excuse will avail the forgetful.
By our own deeds we cannot gain deliverance
on the day when the sky will be bared above the foreheads;
yet amid our wrongdoing and neglect
we still hope for the gracious pardon of Allah.
(3)

He also said:
We die and decay, but our sins—
when we die—neither die nor decay.
How many a man possesses two eyes that profit him nothing;
of what use are eyes to one whose heart is blind?
(4)

And he said:
If any eye could picture the Day of Reckoning before it,
it would never dare to blink.
Glory be to the Lord of the dominion! What a night it will be
whose morning breaks upon the Day of Standing.
Their Lord has written extinction upon His creatures;
mankind is divided between those sent ahead and those left behind.
(5)

It is related that when Abū Nuwās was about to enter the state of iḥram for the pilgrimage, he said: