over us.”

He answered, “O Commander of the Faithful, you are a household whom Allah has chosen from among His servants and to whom He has granted a mighty sovereignty. I praised him (1) only with reference to men of his own stamp and standing.”

The caliph retorted, “By Allah, you have spared no one and left no one; you have included us all when you said:
‘All who dwell on earth of Arab stock …’—the two verses.
Yet even so, I do not deem it lawful to kill you for that, but rather for your disbelief and your polytheism; for you said, concerning a lowly slave:
‘You are the one who sets the days in their proper stations,
who shifts the ages from one state to another.
Whenever I so much as cast a glance toward anyone,
you decree his sustenance and the span of his life.’
Those are deeds that belong to Allah alone. Rip his tongue out through the nape of his neck!”

So they drew his tongue out from the back of his neck, and he died later that same year—may Allah pardon him (2).

Among his lines in praise of Ḥumayd ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd al-Ṭūsī (3) are:
“The world is nothing but Ḥumayd
and his towering acts of generosity; (4)
and should Ḥumayd depart,
then bid the world itself farewell.”

He also said (5):
“Ḥumayd has undertaken the care of earth’s inhabitants;
they have all become his dependents.
It is as though his father, Adam, had charged him
to provide for them unfailingly.”

When this Ḥumayd died in the year 210 AH, together with al-Maʾmūn, at Fam al-Ṣilḥ, al-ʿAkawwāk composed an elegy for him, of which are the lines (6):
“What chastened the peoples before us has chastened us as well,
yet it has left no place for patience to remain.”