Machine summary:
Muhammad saw the harm which this type philosophy was inflicting upon mankind ; and therefore he advised his followers that this active temporal world is nothing but the mani• festation of the Ultimate Reality; or in the language of another great philoso• pher, it is our reflective contact with the temporal flux of things which prepares us for an intellectual vision of the non-temporal.
Indeed the whole philo• sophy of Islam is put in a nutshell in the following words of the Prophet: "It is this that God will say on the Day of Judgment, 'Man, I was poor, but you did not help me.
The account adds that Muhammad used much perfume, filling his beard with a compound of musk and ambergris, till it flowed on to his clothes and ·they were turned black ; and the people of Basrah nicknamed him in consequence Abu'd-Dabs, and a poet of that town wrote of him : 1.
Hammad 'Ajrad composed for Mu• hammad some amatory lines to Zaynab beginning: Who will help a heart distraught, in torment, for love of a gazelle reared in fine halls?' The poem came to the knowledge of Muhammad b.
One song to Zaynab said to have been composed by Muhammad and sung by Hakam al-Wadi, runs : Tell Zaynab: coulds't thou but see my desire toward thee, and my upstanding," And my craving that I might see thee, thy coming being no secret from me!
' The following poem, sung by Hakam al-Wadi, is ascribed to Muhammad, but there is other authority connecting it with Hammad," The company of boon companions had drunk till they were inebriated.