Alas for the era of the Imam al-ʿĀḍid—
anguish like that of a barren woman bereft of her only child.

I sat with his viziers and kept company with his emirs,
men whose praise will never fade. (1)

My heart yearns for the chambers of your palace, now desolate,
O descendant of the Prophet, once crowded with petitioners;

and for your loneliness now that your armies— (2)
formerly like the waves of a vast, still sea—are gone.

You entrusted their affairs to the caliphate’s steward, (3)
but he stumbled and proved unable to mend what had been ruined.

Yet perhaps the revolving nights will restore to you— (4)
what they once accustomed you to of gracious favors.

He also says, in the midst (5) of a qaṣīdah: (6)

O you who rebuke my love for the sons of Fāṭimah,
the blame is yours if your censure is half-hearted.

By Allah, visit the Square of the Two Palaces and weep with me
for them, not for Siffīn (7) or the Camel.

Tell their people, “By Allah, my sores because of you have not closed,
nor has my wound begun to heal.

What, do you imagine the Franks would have done
to the offspring of the family of the Commander of the Believers, ʿAlī?” (8)

Shaykh Shihāb al-Dīn Abū Shāmah, in al-Rawḍatayn, cites a great many poems and panegyrics by ʿUmārah al-Yamanī in praise of the Fatimid caliphs and their kin, (9) and so does the jurist Ibn Khallikān.

Ibn Qurqūl (10)—Ibrāhīm ibn Yūsuf ibn Ibrāhīm ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn Bādis ibn al-Qāʾid al-Ḥamzī, (11) Abū Isḥāq, known as Ibn Qurqūl al-Andalusī—was the author of the book Maṭāliʿ al-Anwār, which he composed as a companion to Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ’s Mashāriq al-Anwār.