There had been, between him and me, a bond of companionship and affection (1) from our earliest years; for close to fifty years we attended hadith gatherings together and pursued knowledge. He possessed many virtues. The titles of his works, the details of his life, what passed between him and the jurists and the state, the several times he was imprisoned, and his various circumstances—all of this lies beyond what this book can contain.
When he died, I was away from Damascus, travelling on the route to the noble Hijaz. News of his passing did not reach us until more than fifty days later, when we had arrived at Tabuk, and we were grieved at his loss—may Allah Most High have mercy on him.
I add: it has been reported that the people who attended the Shaykh’s funeral were even more numerous than what has already been mentioned (2).
Among the greatest funerals in Islam was that of Imam Abu ʿAbd Allah Ahmad ibn Hanbal, for those who attended and offered the funeral prayer over him numbered more than one million people (3).
(1) Manuscripts F, K, and T read: “affection and companionship.” The speaker is the hadith scholar ʿAlam al-Din al-Barzali (d. 739/1339), for the discourse is still his. See Muʿjam Samaʿat al-Barzali (within al-Jamiʿ), pp. 212–223, which records Ibn Taymiyyah, al-Barzali, and al-Mizzi attending hadith auditions together in 680 AH—may Allah have mercy on them all.
(2) Manuscript B reads: “they mentioned.”
(3) Ibn Kathir comments in al-Bidaya wa’l-Nihaya, 18:299: “There is no doubt that the funeral of Imam Ahmad b. Hanbal was immense, owing to the sheer number of his townspeople who gathered for it. Shaykh Taqi al-Din Ibn Taymiyyah died in his own city, Damascus, whose inhabitants are not even one-tenth those of Baghdad, yet they came together for his funeral in numbers that even a powerful ruler with a fully mobilised bureaucracy could not have assembled. This took place although he died in the Citadel, imprisoned by order of the ruler, and despite the fact that many jurists report about him matters that repel adherents of other religions.”