In my essay of last year about al-Thurayya, I searched the most important sources that have written of al-Thurayya in the hope of finding poetry attributed to her, but I came upon nothing except the verses recorded in the Aghani, whose authenticity Abu al-Faraj doubts.

It is related in the Aghani that when al-Thurayya was married in Umar's absence, and the news of her marriage and her departure for Egypt reached him, he journeyed to Medina and wrote to her:

I have written to you from my country the letter of one love-crazed, consumed with grief, melancholy, with streaming eyes, alone with his regrets, whom the flame of longing keeps sleepless, between breast and liver, so that he holds his heart with one hand and wipes his eyes with the other.

He wrote it on a fine sheet, adorned it and made it beautiful, and sent it to her. When she read it she wept bitterly, then recited:

My life for him who cannot stand alone — who, if God does not keep him, is lost.

And she wrote to him, saying:

There came to me a letter whose like men never saw, penned in camphor, musk, and ambergris; its paper of Qus, and its fastening a cord of pure sapphire and gems; at its head, from me to you a greeting: long has my yearning for you been, and my remembering; and its address: from one whose heart is enthralled, to one distracted, lovesick, set aflame with sorrow.

Abu al-Faraj said: "This report I hold to be fabricated — its feeble verse shows as much — but I have set it down as it came to me." This testimony of Abu al-Faraj shows that al-Thurayya stood too high for this feeble verse to be ascribed to her, and that had she composed, she would have produced something surpassing these lines in force and in meaning.

In any case, the sources in our hands record nothing of her poetry.

Al-Thurayya before al-Walid ibn Abd al-Malik

When Suhayl died, leaving her — or divorced her — she went out to al-Walid ibn Abd al-Malik...

He asked her to recite something of Umar's poetry. She said: "May God have mercy on him — he was chaste, and chaste in his verse. I recite his words:

What would it cost the traces at al-Bulayyayn to make plain a returned greeting, or to answer..." etc.

When al-Walid was alone with Umm al-Banin he said to her: "How splendid al-Thurayya is! Do you know what she intended by reciting to me what she recited of Umar's verse?" She said no. He said: "When I alluded to him before her, she alluded to me that my mother was a Bedouin woman."

Whoever peruses the first volume of the Aghani will observe that most of Umar's ladies knew how to read and write; they would read his letters and correspond with him.

Humayda bint al-Nu'man ibn Bashir al-Ansari

The lampooning poetess. She was a woman of stand-ing and rank — her sister was the wife of al-Hajjaj — and al-Hajjaj afterward married Humayda's daughter.

Humayda married and was divorced several times, and she would lampoon her husbands with satire so biting and so coarse that even men would blush to utter it. She had amusing adventures and jests with her husbands. I found a real pleasure

in reading some of her verses, for the spirit of wit and the quickness of mind that are in them. She was famed for her love of jesting.

It is hard for the reader to credit all that is told of her and of her relations with her husbands — above all the answering of the prayer of her husband Rawh ibn Zinba'...

And I have observed that even the women of that age did not shrink from uttering outlandish expressions — Layla al-Akhyaliyya likewise did not disdain to use outlandish expressions in her satire — and al-Nabigha felt no shame before her, but would taunt her with verses that bespeak impudence and scant manners — and she in her turn would answer him in kind.

Al-Harith ibn Khalid ibn al-Asi married her — Humayda, that is — in Damascus

When he came before Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan, she spoke three verses about him — I refrain from quoting them — and then her words reached Abd al-Malik, who said: Had she not set the old men above the young, I would have punished her.

Her sister Amra

She was the wife of al-Mukhtar; then Mus'ab married her after al-Mukhtar was killed. (Humayda and her sister had many husbands, and all of them were men of note.)

Humayda's marriage to Rawh ibn Zinba', and her verse on him, after her divorce from al-Harith

Rawh ibn Zinba': one day he observed her looking at his tribesmen of Judham, who had gathered at his house, and she said: "And what do I see but Judham? By God, I do not love what is lawful of them — any more than what is unlawful." And she said, lampooning him:

The silk wept because of Rawh and disowned his skin, and the fine mantles cried aloud against Judham; and the cloaks said: there was a time when I was your clothing — I, and Kurdish wraps, and plush coverlets.

And she said of him, in an exchange between them:

I give you this much praise: that your reach is short, and that your stock is merely pasted onto Judham.

He answers her — then she replies — then she turns to her brother and recites to him several coarse verses, blaming him for marrying her to a man who belongs to Judham.

Then she turns to Rawh and says (there is a jest and a double meaning in it):

You were named Rawh — "ease" — yet you are grief, as all men know: may God grant no ease to Rawh ibn Zinba'!

Rawh answers her; then she replies to him with several verses, all of them lampoon...

Rawh said, in the course of one of their quarrels

Her marriage to Fayd, and her verse on him

in it: "O God, if she lives on after me, afflict her with a husband who will slap her face and fill her lap with vomit." After him she was married by al-Fayd ibn Muhammad ibn al-Hakam ibn Aqil, a handsome young man who was given to drink, and she loved him; and sometimes he would drink himself drunk, and would slap her face and vomit into her lap, and she would say, "God rest Rawh — his prayer has been answered." ... (What a coincidence!!)

And she said to Fayd:

You were named Fayd — "overflow" — yet nothing overflows from