Never perhaps has the system of undermining authority by continual slandering been applied on such a scale as by the Alids and the Abbasids.
If you were not an adversary, you would not be slandering me and reviling the preaching that is given through me, in order that, as I heard myself in person from the Lord, when I speak I may not be believed, as though forsooth it were I who was condemned and I who was reprobate.'
A poem of some 600 "political" verses, written during his imprisonment on a charge of slandering a neighbour and containing an appeal to the emperor Manuel, is still extant.
