from my objection. He then said, “Allah has accepted your repentance.”

I heard Imām Abū al-ʿAbbās Aḥmad ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥalīm relate that he had heard Shaykh ʿIzz al-Dīn al-Fārūthī say, having himself heard it from our teacher Shihāb al-Dīn al-Suhrawardī:

“I had resolved to devote myself to uṣūl al-dīn (the principles of faith), and I said inwardly, ‘I shall consult Shaykh ʿAbd al-Qādir.’ I went to him, and before I could speak he said, ‘O ʿUmar, that is no provision for the grave! O ʿUmar, that is no provision for the grave!⦗1⦘’

The jurist Muḥammad ibn Maḥmūd al-Marātibī said, “I asked Shaykh al-Muwaffaq, ‘Have you ever seen a miracle (karāmah) from Shaykh ʿAbd al-Qādir?’ He replied, ‘I do not think so. Yet he used to hold his session on Friday; we would leave him and go to hear ḥadīth from Ibn Shāfiʿ, and everything we heard there brought us no benefit.’”

Al-Ḥāfiẓ al-Sayf remarked, “Meaning, because of that conduct.”

Our teacher, the ḥadīth scholar Abū al-Ḥusayn ʿAlī ibn Muḥammad, said, “I heard Shaykh ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz ibn ʿAbd al-Salām, the Shāfiʿī jurist, say: ‘No one’s miracles have reached us by mass transmission (tawātur) except those of Shaykh ʿAbd al-Qādir.’”

He was asked, “And that is in spite of his creed—how can this be?” He replied, “What necessarily follows from a doctrine is not itself the doctrine.”

I remark: He was hinting at Shaykh ʿAbd al-Qādir’s affirmation of the attribute of exaltedness (al-ʿuluww) and the like. The Hanbalī position on such matters is well known; they follow whatever has been authentically reported from their Imām, Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal—may Allah have mercy on him—save for the occasional outlier, and his wording here was broad.

Ibn al-Najjār states in his History: “Shaykh ʿAbd al-Qādir entered Baghdad in 488 AH and studied jurisprudence under Ibn ʿAqīl, Abū al-Khaṭṭāb, al-Mukḥarramī, and Abū al-Ḥusayn ibn al-Farrāʾ, until he mastered both the fundamentals and the subsidiary rulings.”