Al-A'sma'i, The Caliph & A Mesmerising Poem | Mufti Abu Layth

but let me give you an example of how sometimes people in the past saw commanding or enjoining the good the story i narrated to you at the beginning of atar ibn abi rabbah is actually transmitted by a scholar known as asmai and he was a linguist a scholar an absolute like into his poetry and everything and what happens is in his time he was in the time of abu jafar al-mansoor and you've all probably heard of abuja foreign like he was the khalif of one of the early caliphs of the abbasi dynasty now in his time abu jafar was really into all the knowledge

and he used to be into like learning about stuff and learning about firk and learning about poetry loved poetry but then you see the poets then obviously they you know they worked hard for their poetry so they they thought that you know if they wrote a poem for you you had to pay them so he didn't want to really part with his money so he's one of those that i don't mind the poetry but uh i don't really want to pay for it type of thing so what happens is he he puts out this claim that anybody who brings me a poem that i haven't heard of right with the condition i haven't heard of it

whatever they've written it on i will give them the weight of that in gold sounds very enticing right we've got some poets here allahu akbar all right so the thing is so poets got to it they started working on it started writing their poetry now abu jafar al-mansoor what they didn't know is he had like a photographic memory i mean he if you read a poem to him he could just repeat it back to you just like that so and then in his court amongst many of his servants and slaves he had a slave boy that had the memory like a solid memory that

if he heard something twice he could repeat it back to you and he had this one girl amongst his court that if she heard something three times she could repeat it back to you so what he would do is he would have them kind of waiting behind a curtain and you these poets would come they've worked really hard they've written this come up with this poetry this qasida and you would say yeah i'm ikra you know and they would they would kind of say their thing it listened to it my gosh beautiful oh but but you remember the condition yeah i couldn't have heard it before

they say yeah that's fine he goes but i've heard this before say what are you talking about i said look i'll repeat it back to you this this i've heard this since a while look i'll repeat it so you'd repeat it back and then it's the person will think whoa wait a minute i just wrote that he said you know what let me convince you he said go go call for that slave boy of mine go call for him so that guy who's waiting behind the curtain would like come round and it you know the first line of a poem is called a matla so have you heard of this poem with this matlab and the guy would say yeah yeah yeah you have heard it say go and read it and the guy would read it so the poet would be like whoa

i didn't say you know what i don't think that's quite convinced you wait there go call for that girl and she would be waiting behind the curtain she would come forward and say have you heard of this matlab this poem and she would say yeah he said all right go on read it she would read it so the poet would be just astounded that what the hell is this what's going on like i just came up with that i mean how the hell did they actually manage to so that's it he would go so he wouldn't get no money his efforts gone to waste so anyway this went on and on and on for a while so all these poets have got together so they've got together and they're kind

of crying and you know going what the you know these guys ripped us off and everything and along comes asmai who's a legend he's a don in poetry he comes along and he says look what's going on and they say this is what's going on seriously is that what he's doing he says all right i got this don't worry about it so what he does is he dresses up as a bedouin and he goes to the courts of uh abuja after all and he goes yeah you know i'm a bedouin and i've come with a poem and he goes yeah he goes but what's the condition he says oh the condition is i have i can't

i've heard this before remember that he goes all right cool he goes what do i get if if you haven't whatever you've written on it's weight in gold all right cool he says all right so it's cool he says this is called sothosa that means that the the chirping of the nightingale has kind of moved my intoxicated heart this is all right go for it so he says

abu jaf was like what the hell did he just say his jaw has dropped right there he's thinking what the hell was that all i got was so to sofia al-bulbuli i mean so he's so he goes he goes yes yes you know what say you does that pretty much pretty much fit your criteria he goes i just wait there wait there he says go call for that uh that that boy see if he's uh around so he turns up and goes have you heard of this so to suffer

hell no he says all right wait wait they went there he says uh go call for that girl she turns up he says have you heard of this poem so to saphir i ain't heard of sultan bulbuli so he's like damn all right so i've got to pay this one out so he says all right then he says go on then bring what you've brought it on written it on he goes i'm a bedouin i don't really have much possessions i only inherited a pillar of marble from my father

so i wrote it on this pillar of marble and so he says what he says he wrote it on what a pillar of marvel he says he says go on there he says but i need about four people to help me carry it it's outside by the way so now obviously abu jafar al mansoor has to do that so he brings it in the way and it it's costing him almost the entire treasury so then and he's got to hand it and there's all these witnesses he's thinking boy and so he gives it to him and then somebody says by the i think i

recognize that they're doing that's us so he says that's my he says to him are you asmai because that's why they'd heard of us he was a linguist he was a legend in poetry and he says yeah he says ah look you hid your identity from me and this and this and this asmr he says to him listen he says it's reached me what you've been doing to these poets and he says this isn't right that this is the haqq that these people work hard for what they do it is a talent and you deprive them and he said that he said what i will do

he said i'll give you this gold back you can have it back but you promise me that every person that has that has written a poem for you that they will get their due and he said okay he said these people are my witness i will do that and he left and this takes us back to the perspective he could have landed with the

he could have tried that approach he was in the time of the salaf did he no he went there he in fact almost you could say engaged was it about him did he have the knowledge was the objective correct it did serve its purpose sometimes we have to go back to questioning and inquiring about what and why are we actually doing this

these are my thoughts for tonight i ask allah subhanahu ta'ala to give us all the tawfiq to reconnect with this amazing legacy we have and we seriously do have an amazing legacy