In the Name of Allah, the Most Compassionate, the Most Merciful (1)

The jurist-scholar Shaykh Amin al-Din ʿAbd al-Wahhab b. Sallar al-Shafiʿi (2) composed the following elegy for Shaykh Taqi al-Din, Imam Ahmad b. Taymiyyah:

Every living soul must one day taste death;
in this world no mortal is granted permanence.

Every dear friend will part from his companion;
every union is destined, in the end, to unravel. (3)

Nothing endures save the Lord of creation,
Whose sovereignty is everlasting, Whose being never ceases.

My eye pours forth tears that never dry,
while wakefulness is constant and the eyelids overflow. (4)

O wound within my heart that will not heal
unless they grant me their fleeting vision—or unless they return!

Is there anyone to aid or comfort me in what I suffer?
My patience has waned and my grief has only grown.

Alas, my soul, conduct yourself with fortitude,
for the One Who decreed this willed it so.

We have been bereaved of an imam of knowledge and religion,
matchless in his era, without peer.

What sorrow for him has spread among all people!
Ah, the fire whose fuel burns within my breast!

He was the Shaykh al-Islam in both reason and transmitted lore;
the innovations of heresy found no footing with him. (5)

Unique in knowledge and in courage was he,
yet in asceticism and chastity he reigned supreme.