Tarīfah, his maid-servant, said to him, “Fear Allah and spare something for yourself, for these people will leave you neither a dinar nor a dirham, neither a sheep nor a camel.” He thereupon recited:

Tarīfah says:
Our coins never last—
yet we are neither wasteful nor rash.
Should all we possess be spent,
Allah will provide for us through others;
we are not of those who live off anyone else.
A wandering silver piece never grows fond of our ragged purse:
it merely passes across it and moves on.
Whenever, on some day, our dirhams gather together,
they spend that day racing toward the paths of beneficence. (1)

Abū Bakr ibn ʿAyyāsh said: It was asked of Ḥātim, “Is there anyone among the Arabs more generous than you?” He replied, “All the Arabs are more generous than I.” Then he related:

“I once lodged for a night with an orphaned Arab youth who owned a hundred sheep. He slaughtered one for me and served it. When he placed its head before me I remarked, ‘How delicious this brain is!’ He went away and kept bringing me more of it until I said, ‘I have had enough.’ When morning came, I discovered that he had slaughtered the entire hundred sheep and was left with nothing.

“They asked me, ‘What did you do for him?’

“I said, ‘How could I ever repay him fully, even were I to do everything for him?’ They insisted (2), ‘All the same?’

“So I gave him one hundred she-camels from the finest of my herd.”

Muḥammad ibn Jaʿfar al-Khara’iṭī (3) relates in his book Noble Traits of Character: al-ʿAbbās ibn al-Faḍl al-Rabaʿī told us, Isḥāq ibn Ibrāhīm told us, Ḥammād the rāwiyah and a group of elders from Ṭayyʾ told me:

ʿAnarah (4) daughter of ʿAfīf ibn ʿAmr ibn Imruʾ al-Qays, the mother of Ḥātim al-Ṭāʾī, would never hold on to anything; her generosity and openhandedness were renowned. Her brothers (5) tried to restrain her, but she refused. She was a woman of means, so they confined her in a house for a full year, giving her only her daily food, hoping she would desist. After a year they supposed she had abandoned that habit and handed her a purse from her wealth, saying, “Use this for yourself.” A woman from Hawāzin, who used to visit her, came and asked her for something. She said, “Here, take this purse, for by Allah, hunger once bit me so fiercely that I swore never to refuse a petitioner.” Then she recited:

By my life, hunger once bit me with savage jaws—
so I pledged never, for all my days, to turn away the hungry.
Say to the one who censures me today, “Spare me your blame;
and if you will not, then go and gnaw your fingers!”