— and, in the presence of the leading auditors at one of his dictation sessions, he publicly declared: “My son Muhammad is more learned and more virtuous than I am.” Muhammad studied jurisprudence under his father and excelled in it; he also read adab (belles-lettres) with a number of masters, outstripped his peers, and composed elegant poetry. In his father’s final days he washed and prepared his body. He began several works but, because his life was short, completed none of them; God took his soul when he was a little over forty. He had travelled through Iraq and the Hijaz, gone on to Isfahan to hear hadith, met leading shaykhs with lofty isnads, collected manuscripts and books, and himself dictated one hundred and forty sessions on hadith—whoever studies them recognizes that no one had been preceded by anything comparable. Al-Subki records in his Tabaqat (7/8) that whenever a question of literature or language arose, Imam Abu al-Muzaffar would say: “Ask my son Muhammad; he knows the language better than I do.” (1) Al-Silafi praises Abu Bakr with the following verse: “He is al-Muzani when issuing fatwas, In hadith, al-Tirmidhi; The Jahiz of his age in prose, in truth; When it comes to poetry, a Buhturi; In grammar, indisputably al-Khalil; And in the memorisation of languages, al-Asma‘i.” Al-Subki comments (Tabaqat, 7/9) on the line “when it comes to poetry, a Buhturi”: “I wish he had said, ‘and in poetry, the refined poet al-Buhturi,’ thereby avoiding the word tashaa‘ur and the indefinite form of Buhturi.” (*) Principal sources: Qalaid al-‘Iyan, pp. 245-252; al-Dhakhira, MS Qarawiyyin 3/2, pp. 666-702; al-Khareeda (Maghrib & al-Andalus), 2/107-147; Bughiyyat al-Multamis, no. 213; al-Mutrib, p. 178; al-Mu‘jib, pp. 208-224; Takmila Ibn al-Abar, p. 410; Takmila al-Sila, p. 145; al-Maghrib, 2/409-416; Wafayat al-A‘yan, 5/39; Tarikh al-Islam, 4: fol. 187/1; al-‘Ibar, 4/15; Fawat al-Wafayat, 4/27-31; al-Wafi bi-l-Wafayat, 4/297-300; Uyun al-Tawarikh, 13: fol. 294-302; Mir’at al-Janan, 3/197; Kashf al-Zunun, p. 993; Shadharat al-Dhahab, 4/20; Idah al-Maknun, 1/98; Hadiyyat al-‘Arifin, 2/83.