—the emir may listen to the book.”

I replied, “I will never go to him.” They then followed me to the khāniqāh, so I hid. The emir sent the first volume, and I wrote him a formal authorization.

He said: When my grandfather Abū ʿAmr died, he left three shares in a village worth 3,000 dinars—an inheritance that had passed down from his own grandfather Aḥmad ibn Yūsuf al-Sulamī. He also left farmlands and other property. He had no heir except my mother. A domineering man was in charge of the estate, yet—by Allah’s grace—he took nothing and handed everything over to me.

When Abū al-Qāsim al-Naṣrābādhī was getting ready for the pilgrimage, I asked my mother’s permission to go with him. I sold one share for 1,000 dinars and set out in the year 366 AH.

My mother said, “You are heading to the House of Allah; let not your two recording angels write down anything you will be ashamed of tomorrow.”

Whenever I traveled with al-Naṣrābādhī, in every town we entered he would say, “Come, let us attend a hadith session.”

I heard him say, “If something of the emergent realities of Truth manifests itself to you, pay no heed in that moment to Paradise or Hellfire; but when you come back from that state, magnify whatever Allah has magnified.”

He also said, “The foundation of Sufism is adherence to the Book and the Sunnah, abandonment of whims and innovations, veneration of the sanctity of the shaykhs, finding excuses for people, and constancy in one’s devotional litanies.”

ʿAbd al-Ghāfir ibn Ismāʿīl al-Fārisī said in his Siyāq al-Tārīkh: “Abū ʿAbd al-Raḥmān was the shaykh of the Path in his time, favored with success in every science of spiritual reality and in knowledge of the Sufi way. He authored remarkable, widely-known works, inherited Sufism from his father and grandfather, and amassed a library arranged in a manner no one had achieved before—the catalogue of his collection reached a hundred titles or more. He taught hadith for more than forty years, both by recitation and dictation, and he wrote hadith in Nishapur, Marw, Iraq, and the Hijaz; the leading preservers of hadith selected narrations from him.

He studied under his father, his grandfather Ibn Nujayd, Abū ʿAbd Allah al-Ṣaffār, Abū al-ʿAbbās al-Aṣamm, Muḥammad ibn Yaʿqūb al-Ḥāfiẓ, Abū Isḥāq al-Ḥīrī, Abū Jaʿfar al-Rāzī, Abū al-Ḥasan