Abu ʿAlī ibn al-Bannāʾ added: “The sultan was devoted to the transmitted reports (athar), yet he belonged to the Karrāmiyya.
Abū al-Naḍr al-Fāmī said: When the missionary from Egypt—known as the Tāhartī—came to the sultan and, in secret, invited him to the Bāṭinī creed, the Tāhartī used to ride a mule that changed colour every hour, displaying every shade. The sultan grasped the hidden meaning behind their call, became enraged, killed that wicked Tāhartī, and presented his mule to the qāḍī Abū Manṣūr Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad al-Azdī (1), the leading scholar of Herat, saying, “Its former rider was the head of the unbelievers; let it now be ridden by the head of the monotheists.” (2)
Imām al-Ḥaramayn relates that Maḥmūd ibn Subuktigīn was a Ḥanafī who loved hadith, but when he noticed that many of those reports conflicted with his school, he summoned the jurists of Marw and ordered an inquiry into which was stronger—the school of Abū Ḥanīfa or that of al-Shāfiʿī.
They agreed that two units of prayer should be performed before him, one according to each school.
Abū Bakr al-Qaffāl (3) first prayed in full conformity with the Shāfiʿī school: a complete ablution, proper covering, ritual purity, facing the qibla, and every essential element upon which a Shāfiʿī insists. Then he prayed again in a manner Abū Ḥanīfa would judge acceptable: he put on a tanned dog-skin whose quarter was smeared with filth, performed ablution with nabīdh so that flies swarmed around him, carried out the ablution in reverse order, pronounced the opening takbīr in Persian, recited in Persian—dobarkak sabz (4)—rushed through the movements without composure, neither straightening from bowing nor pausing, uttered the tashahhud, and finally broke wind without giving the closing salām.
The sultan said to him, “If the Imām does not consider this prayer valid, I shall kill you.”
At this the Ḥanafīs disowned the prayer, whereupon al-Qaffāl ordered that