at him and said, “I have no need for it.”
The ʿAlawī replied, “It is as though you think it too little,” and he shook the coins out of his sleeve onto al-Khaṭīb’s prayer-rug, adding, “Here are three hundred dinars.”
Al-Khaṭīb rose, his face crimson with embarrassment; he took up his rug, flung the dinars away, and departed.
How lofty was his dignity—and how abject the ʿAlawī—who was left to pick the dinars from the cracks in the reed mat. (1)

Ibn Nāṣir reported: Abū Zakariyyā al-Tabrīzī, the philologist, told us: “When I arrived in Damascus I would read, in al-Khaṭīb’s circle in the great mosque, the literary works I had heard. I was lodging in one of the mosque’s minarets, and he climbed up to me, saying, ‘I wished to visit you in your home.’ We talked for a while, then he produced a slip of paper and said, ‘A gift is recommended; buy pens with this.’ He rose—there were five Egyptian dinars in it—then came up again and laid down about the same amount.
Whenever he recited hadith in the Umayyad Mosque of Damascus, his voice could be heard at the farthest end of the mosque, and he read in flawlessly vocalised, correct Arabic. (2)

Al-Samʿānī said: “I heard from sixteen of his students, and Yaḥyā ibn ʿAlī al-Khaṭīb transmitted to us from him—he had heard him in al-Anbar. I read in my father’s own hand: I heard Abū Muḥammad ibn al-Ābanūsī say: I heard al-Khaṭīb state, ‘Whenever, in the History, I mention a man about whom people’s reports differ with respect to criticism and commendation, rely on the judgment with which I close the entry.’ (3)

Ibn Shāfiʿ related: “Al-Khaṭīb travelled to Ṣūr, where ʿIzz al-Dawla—renowned for generosity—was residing. He drew close to him, benefited from him, and ʿIzz al-Dawla bestowed upon him a large sum of money. He said: and that was the end.”