Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Malik al-Hamadhānī said: Ibn al-Bawwāb, that master of beautiful script, died in Jumādā al-Ūlā in the year 413 AH.

Abū al-Faḍl ibn Khayrūn recorded the same date for his death and added: “He was one of the People of the Sunnah.”

I remark: A poet once jested with him, saying:
“This—while you are the son of a doorkeeper and without a penny;
what if you had been the owner of the house and its wealth!” (1)

Abū al-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī wrote:
“A crescent flashed, like a finely-drawn nūn,
inked in liquid gold by the scribe Ibn Hilāl.” (2)

Al-Sharīf al-Murtaḍā elegized him with these verses:
“O Ibn Hilāl, you have been called back, and death is a fate
from which no human being, however beloved, is protected.

What loss is there in your passing while the days bear witness
that your virtue within them is the lustrous stars? (3)

You enriched the earth and all its peoples
with fair qualities such as rain never brought.

So the hearts you once delighted now sorrow,
and the eyes you once reassured are wakeful.

Life, since you have bidden it farewell, has no fragrance,
nor has the night, since you left it, its dawn. (4)

Now that our horizons have been stripped of you,
no graceful letter-forms (5) nor shining head-strokes (6) remain to us.”

Ibn Khallikān said: al-Kalbī and al-Haytham ibn ʿAdī reported that the one who transmitted the art of writing