111 – ʿAbd Allah narrated to us; my father narrated to me, from an elder of Quraysh, who said:

A client (mawla) of ʿAmr ibn ʿUtbah ibn Abī Sufyān related: ʿAmr ibn ʿUtbah once saw me sitting with a man who was reviling someone else. He said to me, “Woe to you!—and he never said that to me before or after—keep your ears pure from hearing obscenity just as you keep your tongue pure from uttering it, for the listener is a partner of the speaker. That man has merely looked at the worst that is in his own vessel and emptied it into yours. If you were to thrust a fool’s word back into his mouth, the one who rebuffs it would rejoice in doing so just as the one who spoke it is miserable because of it.”