I say: His compositions are priceless, and the most outstanding and noble of them is the book al-Shifāʾ—were it not for the fabricated hadiths with which he stuffed it, the work of an imam who had neither critical scrutiny nor discernment in the science of hadith. May Allah reward him for his good intention and cause people to benefit from his Shifāʾ, as He indeed has; still, it contains a range of far-fetched interpretations. Our Prophet—may Allah’s blessings and peace be upon him—has no need of such reports when the praise found in the Revelation suffices, together with the mass-transmitted traditions, and with the single-chain narrations whose isnāds are clean rather than weak. Why, then, my people, do we gorge ourselves on fabrications, giving those filled with rancor and envy an opening against us? Yet whoever is ignorant is excused. So, my brother, hold fast to the book Dalāʾil al-Nubuwwah by al-Bayhaqī, for it is a cure for what is in the breasts, a guidance, and a light. (1)

Many scholars reported hadith from the Qadi, among them: Imam ʿAbd Allah ibn Muhammad al-Ashīrī; Abū Jaʿfar ibn al-Qaṣīr al-Gharnaṭī; the ḥāfiẓ Khalaf ibn Bashkuwāl; Abū Muhammad ibn ʿUbayd Allah al-Ḥajrī; Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥasan al-Jābirī; and his son, the judge Muḥammad ibn ʿIyāḍ, qadi of Dāniyya.

Some of his poetry:

Look at the fields and their tender shoots,
Mimicking, as they swayed (2) before the winds,
A routed green battalion,
With scarlet anemones within it like wounds. (3)