Al-Samʿānī said: “Abū Zayd al-Ḥamawī was a righteous, upright shaykh—abundant in worship, constant in his recitation, wholly occupied with his own spiritual affairs. He would not leave his home except from one Friday prayer to the next, and I took ḥadith from him.”

I say: “I do not think he ever met Abū al-Ḥusayn ibn al-Ṭuyūrī; rather, he heard from that man’s brother.”

He himself said, “I was born in the year three—or perhaps five—and eighty and four hundred (483 or 485 AH).”

He died in Dhū al-Ḥijjah of the year four and fifty and five hundred (554 AH).

I add: “He authored the book al-Burhān (1) on the Sunnah. We have heard it, though it contains a number of points open to critique ﵀.”

Ibn Muʾmin informed us; al-Ḥusayn ibn Abī Bakr informed us; Jaʿfar ibn Zayd informed us; Aḥmad ibn ʿUbayd Allāh al-ʿUkbarī informed us; Abū Ṭālib al-Ḥarbī informed us; Ibn Mardak informed us; ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Abī Ḥātim informed us; Yūnus narrated, saying, “I heard al-Shāfiʿī say:

‘We affirm the divine attributes that appear in the Quran and are reported in the Sunnah, and we deny any anthropomorphic likeness concerning Him, just as He has denied it of Himself when He said, “There is nothing like unto Him” (al-Shūrā 11).’”

In that same year there died: Abū Saʿd Munjiḥ ibn Mufliḥ al-Dūmī (2); ʿAbd al-Wahhāb ibn Ismāʿīl al-Naysābūrī, the grandson of al-Qushayrī; and Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥasan ibn Jaʿfar ibn—