to catalogue them—meaning the shaykh’s (1) compositions—they would not have managed to do so (2), for he never stopped writing. Allah had favored him with extraordinary speed, and he would write entirely from memory, without consulting any source.

More than one person told me that he completed a concise volume in a single day, and that, on more than one occasion, he produced forty folios in a single sitting—and even more than that. On another occasion I counted what he wrote in one day and made a fair copy of it (3) the following day; it filled eight notebooks and dealt with one of the most intricate questions.

He might compose an entire volume in answer to a single question. As for replies running to fifty folios, sixty, forty, or twenty—those were plentiful.

He would write the answer; if someone capable of making a clean copy was present, that person would do so, otherwise the questioner would take the autograph and depart.

He also laid down many foundational rules in various branches of knowledge—(4) legal theory, positive law, Qur’anic exegesis, and the like. If someone transcribed them (5) from his handwriting they became known; if not, they remained obscure and unheard of. At times a disciple would take a manuscript yet, being unable (6) to copy it and not returning it, the work would simply vanish.

He was often heard to say, “I have already written on such-and-such and on such-and-such.” He would be asked about a matter and reply, “I have written on this,” but no one knew where the manuscript was; then he would turn