1. Say to the prince - may God make his rule everlasting
And increase him in the height of dignity and fame -

2. What can a man say when God has chosen him
To renew the times and the seasons?

3. Who shall we appoint to establish the times of prayer
That he may stand despite the tyrants?

4. Are you content that my rights be tended by the flawed
When I have made you as a stone against the demons?

5. And I have opened the East to you connected
To the West, never without aid and establishment?

6. Was it not the due of my right that you pay it fully
But for the flawed who cannot be led to timeliness?

7. If your field were such that you would not tend its timing
Except with the coordination of the timekeepers!

8. But my right you have cheated of its guardian
So its time is taken up with deviation!

9. You have tended my right with one whose eye is diseased
You have apportioned my livelihood to him without empowerment!

10. What will the man's answer be, then?
May God protect you from blame and lament!

11. Purify your garment from he who does not qualify
To sniff spices, of the virtuous, when he sneezes!

12. Purify your garment from he who has no garment
Whose sin is nothing but the robes of dancers!

13. Drive him from you to a barren wasteland
Or a desert of the harshest wilds!

14. The tar pits are more fit for him
O musk vein, cast him out to the rubble!

15. Abu Ali, how unjustly you were named thus!
You have strayed into rugged ravines!

16. How to be saved when you have plunged heedlessly
And you are not among its twisting paths with skill!

17. You have accepted the flawed, the errant, to fight me,
Yet the errant are not equal to contests!

18. What has called you, without pay, to demand it,
To battle me before the sarcophagi?

19. You have awakened my war when it lay sleeping from you
So be patient for the clearer dawn and arousal!

20. It is as if I see you have met my fire
With rags you flail in them a blind flailing!

21. Like one careful of a fire he prepares for
With ignorance, two shields of tar and sulphur!

22. So what he resorted to has helped against it
And his hands have scattered it - what scattering!

23. You have become blind, my errant brother,
Ugly to every fool without composure!

24. Who casts you into confusion, a babbler forever,
And man delivers the true mute!

25. Take them as followers of he who turned in defeat
As if they were a planet in pursuit of a demon!