Al-Ḥāfiẓ Ibn ʿAsākir states:
He is Imruʾ al-Qays ibn Ḥujr ibn al-Ḥārith ibn ʿAmr ibn Ḥujr Ākil al-Murār ibn ʿAmr ibn Muʿāwiyah ibn al-Ḥārith ibn Yaʿrub ibn Thawr ibn Murtaʿ ibn Muʿāwiyah ibn Kindah.
His kunya was Abū Yazīd; some say Abū Wahb, and others Abū al-Ḥārith al-Kindī. He lived in the districts of Damascus and alluded to a number of those places in his verse, such as:
Stop, let us weep for the memory of a beloved and a dwelling-place
At the rim of al-Liwa, between al-Dukhūl and Ḥawmal,
Then Tawdih and al-Miqrāh—no trace of them has vanished,
Though the south-wind and the north-wind have woven over them.
He remarks, “These are sites known in Ḥawrān.”
Ibn ʿAsākir then narrates, through Hishām ibn Muḥammad ibn al-Sāʾib al-Kalbī:
Furwah ibn Saʿīd ibn ʿAfīf ibn Maʿdī Karib related to me, from his father, from his grandfather, who said:
“While we were in the presence of the Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings be upon him), a delegation from Yemen arrived and said, ‘O Messenger of Allah, Allah saved our lives by means of two lines of poetry from Imruʾ al-Qays.’
“He asked, ‘And how was that?’
“They replied, ‘We had set out to come to you. Partway along the road we lost our way and spent three days unable to find water. Each of us then crawled to the foot of an acacia or samur tree, resigned to die in its shade. When we were breathing our last, a rider came racing up on a camel. As one of us caught sight of him—within the rider’s hearing—he recited:
When she perceived that the watering-place was all she desired,
And the whiteness of her chest was streaked with blood,
She made for the spring that lies by Ḍārij,
Over which shade drifts, its surface thick with floating weed.
“Whereupon the rider asked, ‘Whose verses are these, when he saw the plight we are in?’ We answered, ‘They are by Imruʾ al-Qays ibn Ḥujr.’”