say: “My uncle Abū al-Faḍl copied one thousand fascicles from Ibn Shādhān.” I also heard ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Anmāṭī say, “No one like Abū al-Faḍl ibn Khayrūn has ever been seen. Mention to him any of the books or individual parts he had heard and he would immediately tell you from whom he heard it and through which chain; he would name the shaykh, the text transmitted, and what was unique to him.”

Abū Manṣūr said: “Once people wrote after my uncle’s name the title ‘al-Ḥāfiẓ’. He became upset, struck it out, and said, ‘Have we recited so much that al-Ḥāfiẓ should be written for me?!’ ”

I add: He also recited the variant readings to Abū ʿAlī al-Wāsiṭī and to ʿAlī ibn Ṭalḥah—his nephew Abū Manṣūr ibn Khayrūn read before him—and to Abū ʿAlī ibn Sukkara al-Ṣadafī. In those days people would say, “He is like Yaḥyā ibn Maʿīn in his own time,” pointing to his authentication of the scholars of his age, his clarification of their weaknesses, and the fairness with which he did so.

Al-Silafī said: “He was the Yaḥyā ibn Maʿīn of his era.”⦗1⦘

Ibn Ṭāhir criticised him with baseless remarks, claiming that he added items in his own hand to al-Khaṭīb’s History.

I reply: What ‘additions’? They were only marginal notes, and his teacher al-Khaṭīb had given him permission for that. His handwriting is well known and unmistakable.

He died in Rajab 488 AH, at the age of eighty-four years and one month.

Among those who died with him were: the Iraqi shaykh Abū Muḥammad Rizq Allāh ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Tamīmī; the Muʿtazilite exegete Abū Yūsuf ʿAbd al-Salām al-Qazwīnī; and a number of others whom I have mentioned in Tadhkirah⦗2⦘ and elsewhere.