It was also read to him in the Mansūr Mosque, and an immense multitude listened. The last person to recite it before him was our shaykh Ibn al-Akhdar, a truthful and trustworthy elder—among the most commendable of the Sufi masters—renowned for his scrupulous piety and worship despite his advanced years. He owned fine autograph manuscripts and possessed sound certificates of audition (1).
He then said: I found in the book of Aḥmad ibn Ṣāliḥ al-Jīlī:
Our shaykh Abū al-Waqt passed away on the night of Sunday, the sixth of Dhū al-Qaʿda in the year 553 AH, at the middle of the night. His funeral prayer was performed later that morning at the Fayrūz hospice where he had been residing, and then another prayer was held for him in the congregational mosque, with Shaykh ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jīlī (2) pronouncing the amīn. The crowd was immense. I was with him on the fifth of the month and read hadith to him until the ẓuhr prayer. His judgment was sound and his mind alert; we never saw anyone of his age whose chain of transmission matched his.
He was a righteous Sunni shaykh and a reciter of the Qur’an who had kept company with the senior masters and lived long enough to link the youngsters to the elders. In the sphere of hadith leadership he attained a rank unmatched by any of his peers. People who had shown no prior interest in transmission came to hear from him. He was the last person on earth to narrate from al-Dāʾūdī and the rest of his shaykhs. All the books in his possession, together with many individual fascicles, were read to him several times in various gatherings, and thousands of people heard them from him. He reached Baghdad on the eleventh of Shawwāl in the year 552 AH and kept company with the Shaykh al-Islām for a little over twenty years.
A group of us were informed, through Ibn al-Najjār, who said:
Dāwūd ibn Muʿammar in Isfahān recited to us, and Muḥammad ibn al-Faḍl al-ʿUqaylī recited for himself in the year 551:
“The shaykh Abū al-Waqt has come to you
Bearing the finest reports, transmitted with firm authority.”