So I washed him, and when I lifted his arm so that water could reach the creases, the ring dropped from his hand—the very ring I had seen. I also noticed marks on his body and face that showed he had been poisoned. His bier was carried to the Palace Mosque, and a throng accompanied him the like of which we had never seen for any person. The weeping over him was intense because of the charity and justice he had practiced, and the poets composed elegies for him. ⦗1⦘
I say: He authored a work entitled Al-Ifṣāḥ ʿan Maʿānī al-Ṣiḥāḥ, an exposition of the two Ṣaḥīḥs of al-Bukhārī and Muslim, in ten volumes ⦗2⦘; he wrote a book on Devotional Acts (al-ʿIbādāt) according to the school of Ahmad; he composed a didactic poem on the maqṣūr and mamdūd forms, another on the science of penmanship, and he produced an abridgment of Ibn al-Sikkīt’s Iṣlāḥ al-Manṭiq ⦗3⦘.
It is related that Ḥayṣ Bayṣ once entered upon the vizier, and the vizier said, “I have composed two verses; strengthen them”:
A phantom came to visit, slender as the one who sent it;
Neither embrace nor kisses could ease the ache it left.
No specter⦗4⦘ calls on me save to conspire with me
To banish sleep—then it departs and is gone.
(1) For samples of the elegies composed in his memory, see al-Muntazam, vol. 10, p. 217, and Ibn Rajab, Tabaqat, vol. 1, pp. 286-287.
(2) Ibn Rajab relates that, when the author reached the hadith, “Whomever Allah wishes good for, He grants him understanding (*fiqh*) of the religion,” he commented on it at length, explaining the concept of *fiqh* and listing both the agreed-upon and disputed legal questions among the four celebrated imams. Later scholars detached this section and published it separately in one volume under the title al-Ifsah; it is therefore only an extract from the larger work. See Ibn Rajab, Dhayl Tabaqat al-Hanabila, vol. 1, p. 252. A printed edition (Aleppo, 1928) was prepared by the scholar Muhammad Raghib al-Tabbakh.
(3) For the remainder of his writings, consult Ibn Rajab, Tabaqat, vol. 1, pp. 252-253, and Kuttub, Hadiyyat al-Arifin, vol. 2, p. 521. Ibn Rajab also notes that Ibn al-Jawzi compiled al-Muqtabas min al-Fawaid al-Awniyya, gathering the benefits he heard from the vizier Awn al-Din, highlighting the latter’s scholarly rank, and extracting the cream of his remarks on hadith from al-Ifsah in a separate treatise entitled Mahd al-Mahd (“The Quintessence of the Quintessence”). Samples of his poetry are reproduced in Ibn Rajab, Tabaqat, vol. 1, pp. 280-282.
(4) Wafayat al-Ayan reads “qat” in place of “al-taif.”