He also possessed a copy of al-Qāḍī ʿAbd al-Jabbār’s ʿAhd, written in the elegant hand of al-Ṣāḥib Ismāʿīl ibn ʿAbbād, each line occupying a full leaf, and enclosed in an ebony cover as thick as a column. In addition, he presented Niẓām al-Mulk with a Qurʾan manuscript executed in a refined script: between its lines the variant readings appeared in red, the lexical notes in green, and the grammatical parsing in blue, the whole work richly gilded. Niẓām bestowed upon him three hundred dinars for it—an unfair price, though he apologized, saying, “I have no lawful money save this.”(1)

Al-Muʾtaman remarked, “I left him because of the doctrines he ostentatiously upheld.”

Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Malik said, “He was eloquent, winsome in gesture, and had committed to memory a trove of rare tales and reports. He adhered to the Zaydī school and produced a commentary in seven hundred large volumes.”(2)

It is related that al-Ghazālī once visited him and sat before him. He asked al-Ghazālī, “Where are you from?”

“From the Madrasah in Baghdad,” al-Ghazālī replied.

Al-Ghazālī later said, “Had I told him that I was from Ṭūs, he would have begun ridiculing the stupidity of its people—how they once petitioned al-Maʾmūn, invoking the grave of his father that lies among them, and begged him to move the Kaʿbah to their town.

“It is also reported that one of them, when asked about his zodiac sign, replied, ‘The billy-goat.’ When people objected, he said, ‘Two years ago it was the kid; now it has grown up.’”

Abū ʿAlī ibn Sukkara said, “Abū Yūsuf was an open Muʿtazilite propagandist who would say, ‘No one remains to champion this school but me.’ He had become very old—so much so that he was scarcely visible in his own gathering—yet he retained the tongue of a young man. He told me that his Qurʾanic commentary filled three hundred volumes.”(3)