al-Ahnaf's Petition to Umar for Basra

خطبة الأحنف لعمر في أهل البصرة

Medina

Al-Ahnaf ibn Qays came to Umar with the Basrans; Umar heard them one by one while al-Ahnaf sat silent in a corner till asked — then: 'our brothers of the garrison towns dwell between sweet waters and tangled gardens, and we in a reeking marsh whose dew never dries nor pasture grows, the briny sea eastward, the waste westward, no tillage no milk, our due reaching us like an ostrich's gullet; the weak man walks two farsakhs for sweet water and the woman miscarries her child going — lift our misery and mend our poverty or we are a people lost'. Umar joined Basra's children to the stipend and wrote Abu Musa to dig them a canal.