when I return; they still serve me well and have plenty of wear left in them, and my expenses are covered by the rent from a house my father left me—so what should I do with this?”
I said, “Distribute it among your companions.”
He replied, “None of my companions is poor.”

So I went back and informed the king. He said, “Praise be to Allah who has spared him from us and spared us from him.”

Abū Saʿīd al-Naqqāsh said: Ibn Samʿūn referred everything to Qur’anic knowledge and the outward sciences, holding fast to the Book and the Sunnah. I met him and attended his session. I heard him asked about the divine saying, “I am the companion of the one who remembers Me.”(1) He answered, “I protect him from sin; I am with him wherever he remembers Me; I am his helper.”

Al-Sulamī: I heard Ibn Samʿūn, and he was asked about taṣawwuf. He said: “As for the name, it means leaving the world and its people; as for its reality, it is forgetting the world and forgetting its people.”

I also heard him say: “Those most deserving of loss on the Day of Resurrection are the people of pretension and gestures.”

Abū al-Ḥasan al-ʿAtīqī said: Ibn Samʿūn died—he was reliable and trustworthy—in mid-Dhu al-Qaʿda of the year 387 AH.(2)

Abū Bakr al-Khaṭīb said: In 426 AH Ibn Samʿūn’s remains were moved from his house and buried in the Bāb Ḥarb cemetery, and, it is said, his shroud had not decayed.(3)

I say: Yes, a shroud can remain intact for about one hundred years, because no air reaches it and thus it is preserved.

Abū Muḥammad Ibn Ḥazm transmitted a fanciful tale with no foundation, saying: “A shaykh—whose name was