[82] Feroze was a poet, as well as a statesman; and his verses lamenting the captivity of his family, and threatening revenge, have been preserved. (Tabari i. p. 220.) Abd Yaghûth, or servant of the idol of that name worshipped in the south of Arabia. See Lyall’s translations from the Hamasah, quoted above. We hear of him afterwards, but not much of Feroze.
[83] As usual, no date is given. But as only now he met Ikrima, who had made a march of several weeks from Omân, after the campaign in the East, the period must have been late in the year A.H. XI., if not the beginning of A.H. XII. Tabari, as I have said before, places the entire reduction of apostate Arabia within A.H. XI.
Mohâjir was brother to Omm Salma, one of the Prophet’s wives. He was one of the malingerers who absented himself from the Tebûk campaign, and so incurred the displeasure of Mahomet. (Life of Mahomet, chap. xxviii.) But Omm Salma, one day, washing the Prophet’s head, made mention to him of her brother, and, finding the opportunity favourable, called him in. His excuse was accepted; and the government of Hadhramaut was then and there conferred on him.
[84] The verses are quoted by Tabari, vol. i. p. 224. The Arabs, and especially their poets, had the faculty of abusing one another in the grossest manner. About the same time, lampoons were bandied between Amr ibn Mádekerib and Farwa, a loyal chief of the Beni Murâd, who maintained a constant check upon Amr’s proceedings. As regards Farwa, we are told that when he first presented himself to Mahomet, he explained how his tribe and the Beni Hamdân had an idol which each kept alternately for a year. The contested possession of this idol led in bygone time to the famous battle of Al Razm.
[85] The Beni Sakûn were loyal throughout the rebellion, and gave protection to the faithful refugees from other tribes. Among others, Moâdz ibn Jabal, deputed by Mahomet to teach the tribes of the south the Corân and the tenets of Islam (Life of Mahomet, chap, xxx.), took refuge with them, and married a lady from amongst them. He was so enamoured of this Sakûnite wife that it used to be his constant prayer that in the resurrection he and she might both be raised together. He died in the plague A.H. XVIII.
[86] See the account of their brilliant cavalcade and the betrothal, Life of Mahomet, chap. xxx.
[87] A thousand women were captured in the fortress. They called after Ashâth as he passed, ‘he smelleth of burning,’ i.e. he is a recreant traitor.
[88] Her name was Omm Farwa. Their son Mohammed was killed fighting in the army of Musáb against Mokhtâr. Some verses by Ashâth lamenting the catastrophe of Nojeir have been preserved by Tabari, vol. i. p. 248.
[89] She was the daughter of one Nomân, who, praising her attractions to Mahomet, added, as the climax, that she never had had sickness of any kind. After a private interview with her, Mahomet sent her back to her home in the south, saying, ‘Had the Lord seen anything good in her, it had not been thus.’
In the Life of Mahomet, I rejected as apocryphal this and other accounts of the Prophet’s betrothal to certain females with whom marriage was not consummated. In the present case, however, the betrothal is certainly confirmed by the curious objection taken by the army to Ikrima’s marriage on account of the inchoate relation in which she at one time stood to the Prophet; and it is therefore possible that other betrothals which at the time appeared to me improbable may also be founded on fact. See Life of Mahomet, chap, xxii., and Ibn Cotâba, p. 18.