Down With Adam Were Sent Five Things of Iron

Ironworking is one of the oldest crafts in the world. On the authority of Ibn ‘Abbas, may God be pleased with him, it is reported that a hammer, an anvil, and a set of tongs are what Adam was sent down with, peace be upon him. It is also narrated that he was sent down with myrrh, and with a shovel. 

According to another report, five things of iron were sent down with Adam: an anvil, tongs, a needle, a hammer, and a mīqa‘a, which is glossed as either a whetstone, a mallet, a sledgehammer, or a tool for roughing up a millstone's grinding edge.

Another report of of Ibn ‘Abbas has it that Adam, peace be upon him, was sent down from Paradise with a bāsina. This designates a craftsman's tool or the blade of a plow; in either case, the word is not Arabic in origin.

From Fulfilment of the Aspiration to Knowledge of the Fortunes
and Lifeways of the Arabs by Mahmud Shukri al-Alusi

John Bonham, isolated drum track from "Fool In the Rain" (1979)

If in Brooklyn

Glad to be reading this Thursday at the launch of Aditya Bahl's chapbook MUKT (Organism for Poetic Research, 2021). 

Shuttles

Another verse where Abu Tammam goes wrong is the following (meter: ṭawīl):

      The places where your tribe once stayed are vacant, I attest,
         their traces worn away like the washa’i‘ of a mantle.

He treats washa’i‘ as if they were the selvages of a mantle, but this is not the case. In reality, washa’i‘ [sg. washī‘] are a weaver's "shuttles," which draw the coiled thread of the weft between the fibers of the warp, as in the verse by Dhu 'l-Rumma (meter: ṭawīl):

      [The sands] are played by forceful winds that weave it
         like a Yemeni whose washa’i‘ weave a mantle.

As for the verse of Kuthayyir (meter: ṭawīl),

      Washī‘ in script-like pattern [sic] renews the homes of ‘Azza's tribe
         before all trace of them is wiped away in summer.

He uses washī‘ to mean "stuffing" in a gap between two things. But shuttles are for thread... and what it means is that their homes—specifically, their khiyām—were renewed by stuffing [the gaps in their walls with fresh panic grass]. His mistake is due to inexperience of the trappings of settled life. When a Bedouin uses the wrong word for something, having never seen it first hand, it is excusable.
      For Abu Tammam, on the other hand, there is no excuse, because he belonged to sedentary civilization, and was hardly ignorant of it. But he grants himself license, [and is flagrant about it,] as you can see in a separate poem where he describes his own poetic work (meter: basīṭ):

     Jest and earnest are combined in the shuttling of its weft,
        as are nobility and scurrility with grief and ecstasy.

From The Weigh-in Between the Poetry of Abu Tammam and al-Buhturi by Abu 'l-Qasim al-Amidi