269 – Abū al-Ḥasan al-Khuzaʿī narrated to me; he said: A man from the descendants of Shabīb ibn Shaybah told me that Shabīb ibn Shaybah stayed away from Basra for twenty years. When he finally returned, he went to his old gathering-place but found none of his former companions there, and he recited:
O meeting-place of those men—
their dispersal has scattered all the dwellings!
Once thronging with life, you have become a wasteland
through which the north-winds tear.
So if I behold you desolate today,
is it not because I see you stripped of your people?