requiring implements; whatever food he did permit himself was brought from Būshanj to Baghdad as a precaution. He kept company with Abū ʿAlī al-Daqqāq and Abū ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Sulamī in Nīshābūr, and accompanied Fākhir al-Sijzī in Bust (1) on the latter’s journey to Ghaznah (2). He also met Yaḥyā ibn ʿAmmār the preacher … until the narrator went on to say:

He then began to preside over gatherings of admonition and legal opinion, to teach, and to write, possessing a fair share of talent in both verse and prose.

Among those who related from him were Musāfir ibn Muḥammad and his brother Aḥmad, Abū al-Maḥāsin Asʿad ibn Ziyād al-Mālīnī, Abū al-Waqt ʿAbd al-Awwal al-Sijzī, and ʿĀʾishah bint ʿAbd Allah al-Būshanjiyyah (3).

I heard Yūsuf ibn Muḥammad ibn Fārawa al-Andalusī say—I heard it from ʿAlī ibn Sulaymān al-Murādī—that Abū al-Ḥasan ʿAbd al-Ghāfir ibn Ismāʿīl used to say: “I heard the Ṣaḥīḥ from Abū Sahl al-Ḥafṣī, and al-Dāwūdī authorised it for me; the authorisation of al-Dāwūdī is dearer to me than hearing it from al-Ḥafṣī.” (4)

And I heard Asʿad ibn Ziyād say: “Our shaykh al-Dāwūdī spent forty years without eating meat—during the period of Turkmen unrest and rampant looting—and it harmed his health. He therefore took to eating fish that was caught for him from a great river. Then someone told him that one of the amirs had eaten on the bank of that river and had his food-tray shaken out so that the leftovers fell into the water, whereupon he never ate fish again.”