and recite.’

I strained to read the Opening chapter, but could not; my tongue seemed tied. He asked, ‘Do you have a mother?’ I said, ‘Yes.’

He said, ‘Tell her to pray that Allah grant you the ability to recite the Quran and to gain knowledge.’ I replied, ‘Very well.’

So I went back, asked her to supplicate, and she did. I grew older, travelled to Baghdad, and there I studied Arabic and jurisprudence. When I later returned to Rayy, I was in the congregational mosque collating al-Muzanī’s Mukhtaṣar when that very shaykh arrived, greeted us—without recognising me—listened to our collation though he did not grasp what we were reading, and then said, ‘When is someone ever going to learn material like this?’

I wanted to reply, ‘If you have a mother, ask her to pray for you,’ but I felt too shy. (1)

Abū Naṣr al-Ṭuraythīthī said: I heard Sulaim say, ‘I copied the entire Taʿlīqa from our teacher Abū Ḥāmid, and I heard him remark:

“Sur has lowered my standing, while Baghdad—thanks to Abū al-Ḥasan ibn al-Maḥāmilī—has raised it.”’ (2)

Abū al-Qāsim Ibn ʿAsākir said: I was informed that Sulaim only took up the study of jurisprudence after he had passed forty.

He also said: I read in the handwriting of Ghayth al-Armanāzī: ‘The jurist Sulaim drowned in the Red Sea off the coast of Jeddah after performing ḥajj in Ṣafar of the year 447 AH; he was then past eighty.’

He was a jurist of recognised authority, authored many works in law and other sciences, and taught extensively. He was the first to spread this knowledge in Sur (Tyre), and many benefited from him, among them the jurist Naṣr. I was told that he would reckon with himself for every breath, never letting a moment pass without benefit—copying, teaching, or reading.

I was also told that he kept his lips moving in remembrance until the pen split. (3)