Abu ‘Ali al-Hirmazi said: The poet al-Farazdaq halted with his traveling party at al-Ghariyyan at the end of their first night's journey out of Kufa. On one of their camels went the skinned and dressed carcass of a sheep he had just had slaughtered when their departure was made in haste.
There came a wolf, who tried to wrest the carcass from the back of the camel it was tied to. This threw all the camels of the riding party into a panic, at which al-Farazdaq rose to see the wolf tugging at the meat. He cut off one hoof of the sheep and threw it to the wolf, who picked it up and went a little ways off with it. When the wolf came back, al-Farazdaq cut off another hoof and threw it.
Morning came, and when the company awakened, al-Farazdaq told them what had happened, and went on to say this about it:
The loping wolf, whose coat is threadbare. How affable was he!
I invited him to share my fire when night was late.
When he came close, I said: "Come closer!
What's mine has been provided us in common."
That night, I divided my provisions equally,
now in the fire's light, now in its smoke.
He laughed and bared his teeth, and I said to him,
with the grip of my sword firm in hand:
"Eat up, wolf! Now that there is trust between us,
let us be like boon companions.
You are a gentleman, wolf, but you
were nursed on the same breast as treachery itself.
You and treachery are each other's little brother!
Anyone else you woke to beg a meal from
would have come at you with arrows, or the point of a spear.
But even though companions come to blows,
on the road they must be brothers to each other.
[After all,] when has God ever put a disunited soul back
to tread the track of travelers, anywhere they go?"
Verses 1–9 of a 47-verse poem (meter: ṭawīl)
from the Collected Poems of al-Farazdaq
collected by Muhammad ibn Habib (cf.)
