Abu ’l-‘Atáhiya, unlike his great rival, came of Arab stock. He was bred in Kúfa, and gained his livelihood as a young man by selling earthenware. His poetical talent, however, promised so well that he set out to present himself before the Caliph Mahdí, who richly rewarded him; and Hárún al-Rashíd afterwards bestowed on him a yearly pension of 50,000 dirhems (about £2,000), in addition to numerous extraordinary gifts. At Baghdád he fell in love with ‘Utba, a slave-girl belonging to Mahdí, but she did not return his passion or take any notice of the poems in which he celebrated her charms and bewailed the sufferings that she made him endure. Despair of winning her affection caused him, it is said, to assume the woollen garb of Muḥammadan ascetics,[534] and henceforth, instead of writing vain and amatorious verses, he devoted his powers exclusively to those joyless meditations on mortality which have struck a deep chord in the hearts of his countrymen. Like Abu ’l-‘Alá al-Ma‘arrí and others who neglected the positive precepts of Islam in favour of a moral philosophy based on experience and reflection, Abu ’l-‘Atáhiya was accused of being a freethinker (_zindíq_).[535] It was alleged that in his poems he often spoke of death but never of the Resurrection and the Judgment--a calumny which is refuted by many passages in his Díwán. According to the literary historian al-Ṣúlí († 946 A.D.), Abu ’l-‘Atáhiya believed in One God who formed the universe out of two opposite elements which He created from nothing; and held, further, that everything would be reduced to these same elements before the final destruction of all phenomena. Knowledge, he thought, was acquired naturally (_i.e._, without Divine Revelation) by means of reflection, deduction, and research.[536] He believed in the threatened retribution (_al-wa‘íd_) and in the command to abstain from commerce with the world (_taḥrímu ’l-makásib_).[537] He professed the opinions of the Butrites,[538] a subdivision of the Zaydites, as that sect of the Shí‘a was named which followed Zayd b. Alí b. Ḥusayn b. ‘Alí b. Abí Ṭálib. He spoke evil of none, and did not approve of revolt against the Government. He held the doctrine of predestination (_jabr_).[539] Abu ’l-‘Atáhiya may have secretly cherished the Manichæan views ascribed to him in this passage, but his poems contain little or nothing that could offend the most orthodox Moslem. The following verse, in which Goldziher finds an allusion to Buddha,[540] is capable of a different interpretation. It rather seems to me to exalt the man of ascetic life, without particular reference to any individual, above all others:-- "If thou would'st see the noblest of mankind, Behold a monarch in a beggar's garb."[541]