you still kept choosing Jupiter’s good fortune for it, yet you did not ward it off from Bahrām’s evil star. (1)
The Conjunction and Ptolemy have never come together—whether when something is being undone or when it is being accomplished.

So Ibn Muqla was dismissed from the vizierate: his house was demolished, his trees destroyed, his hand severed, then his tongue; he was fined one million dinars and afterwards imprisoned in solitary confinement, with no one to serve him. (2) This befell him when he was old, weak, and in desperate straits, (3) after the loss of some of his limbs. He had to draw water for himself from a deep well, lowering the rope with his left hand and gripping it with his teeth, and he endured the most painful hardship after having tasted the sweetest ease.

Among the verses he composed when his hand was cut off:

I never wearied of life, yet I trusted their oaths,
 and so my right hand was severed.
I sold my faith to them for worldly gain,
 and they deprived me of their world after my faith.
With all my strength I guarded their lives,
 but they showed me no protection.
After the right hand, life holds no delight—
 O my life, my right hand is gone; begone with it!

He would often weep over his hand and say, “After serving three caliphs with it and writing out the Qurʾān twice, it is cut off as thieves’ hands are cut.” Then he would recite:

If part of you dies, weep for the part that remains,
 for one part is ever close to another.

He died—may Allah have mercy on him—in that prison and was buried in the palace grounds. Later his son Abū al-Ḥusayn asked that he be moved; permission was granted, so they exhumed him and he re-interred his father in his own house. Afterwards his wife, known as al-Dīnārīyah, requested that he be buried in her residence; permission was given, and he was exhumed once more and buried beside her. Thus it happened three times.

He—may Allah have mercy on him—died at the age of fifty-six.

Abū Bakr ibn al-Anbārī (4)
Muḥammad ibn al-Qāsim ibn Muḥammad ibn Bashshār ibn al-Ḥasan ibn Bayān ibn Samāʿah ibn Farwah ibn