Al-Samʿānī also related that a jurist once heard Asʿad al-Mīhanī striking his own face and saying, “Oh, woe to me (1) for what I have neglected in my duty to Allah (2)” (Q 39:56). He wept and kept repeating the verse until he passed away in Hamadhān in the year 527 (3) AH. Earlier he had been sent as an envoy to Sultan Sanjar in Marw and, on another occasion, to Hamadhān, and he left behind considerable wealth and a number of slaves.
He lived for sixty-six years, and the ḥadith master Ibn ʿAsākir mentioned him in Tabyīn Kadhib al-Muftarī (4).
Mīhana is a small settlement near Ṭūs.
375 – Ibn Abī Ṣalt, Abū al-Ṣalt Umayya ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Dānī *
The erudite scholar, philosopher, physician, poet, and accomplished Qurʾān reciter (5), Abū al-Ṣalt Umayya ibn
(1) The final alif in the expression ya hasrata stands for the first-person possessive ya, so the sense is “O, my regret!” Al-Farra, Maani al-Quran, 2/421, notes that the Arabs regularly replace the ya with an alif in every utterance that carries the force of an appeal or supplication.
(2) Al-Raghib states that the primary meaning of janb is a bodily “side,” whence it is metaphorically extended to the adjacent “aspect” or “direction,” as happens with other bodily terms such as “right” and “left.” Here the term is figurative and presupposes an omitted genitive, i.e. “in the direction of obedience to God” or “in what is due to Him,” namely His obedience. Neglecting “the direction of obedience” is therefore a trope for neglecting obedience itself, for whoever abandons the locus necessarily abandons what it contains, all the more so. See Zad al-Masir, 7/192 (our edition).
(3) That is, “and five hundred.” All the biographers adopt this dating, whereas Ibn al-Jawzi and Ibn al-Athir record his death in 523 AH.
(4) p. 320.
(*) Tarikh al-Hukama, p. 80; Kharidat al-Qasr, 1/223–343; Mujam al-Udaba, 7/52–70; al-Kamil fi al-Tarikh, 11/18; Tuhfat al-Qadim, p. 3; Tabaqat al-Atibba, 501–514; al-Maghrib, 1/256; Wafayat al-Ayan, 1/243–247; Tarikh al-Islam, 4:277/1–2; al-Ibar, 4/74; Husn al-Muhadara, 1/539; Nafh al-Tib, 2/105; Shadharat al-Dhahab, 4/83–85.
(5) For a list of his works, see Wafayat al-Ayan, 1/247, and Mujam al-Udaba, 7/64; he compiled them while imprisoned by al-Afdal in Egypt.