Your bounty—while the whole world is needy before you;
Your bounty—while gracious deeds are denied among men. ⦗1⦘

Were Jaʿfar, O Yaḥyā, to covet your station,
Yahya and Jaʿfar themselves would call him back. ⦗2⦘

I have never seen anyone plot harm against you, Abū al-Muẓaffar,
Without your being the one whom God makes triumphant.

Ibn al-Jawzī ⦗3⦘ said: “He exerted himself to the utmost in upholding the grandeur of the ʿAbbāsid state, suppressing dissenters by every manner of stratagem, and he decisively settled the affairs of the Seljuq sultans. In his youth a certain shihna had mistreated him; after he became vizier he summoned the man and honored him. He often spoke of Allah’s favors and, even while in high office, would recall the extreme poverty he had once endured.

He said, ‘One day I went down to the Tigris and did not have even a single loaf of bread to pay for the crossing.’

He was constantly in the company of scholars and the poor, giving them money so freely that an entire year might pass while debts still weighed upon him. He said, ‘Zakāt has never become obligatory on me.’ Whenever he learned something new he would say, ‘So-and-so taught it to me.’ I once explained to him the meaning of a hadith, so he would thereafter say, ‘Ibn al-Jawzī taught me this,’ and I felt shy at that. He set aside a session for me in his house every Friday and allowed the common folk to attend.

One of the poor men used to read to him frequently and pleased him greatly; he said to his wife, ‘I want to marry him to our daughter,’ but the mother became angry. Hadith was read in his presence every day after ʿAṣr. On one occasion a Mālikī jurist attended; I mentioned an issue, he opposed the consensus on it, and he stubbornly persisted.

The vizier said to him, ‘Are you a donkey? Do you not see that everyone disagrees with you?’

The next day he said to the gathering, ‘Yesterday I behaved toward this man in a way that does not befit me. Let him say to me what I said to him, for I am only one of you.’ The whole assembly burst into tears; the jurist offered an apology, but he said, ‘I have more right to apologize.’

He then began repeating, ‘Retribution! Retribution!’

He continued in that vein until Yūsuf al-Dimashqī said, ‘When he refused…’