“Sit down beside one of these pillars so that we may come and sit with you.”

When I resolved to take my seat, it happened that he fell ill, and thereafter it was not decreed for him to leave for the mosque (1)… until Abū Muḥammad al-Qāsim said:

“My father—may Allah have mercy on him—had listened to a number of narrations for which he never obtained written copies, relying instead on the transcriptions of his companion, the ḥāfiẓ Abū ʿAlī ibn al-Wazīr (2). What Ibn al-Wazīr had copied my father did not possess, and what my father possessed Ibn al-Wazīr had not copied. One night I heard my father speaking with a friend in the congregational mosque and saying:

‘I travelled, yet it is as though I never travelled. I had assumed that Ibn al-Wazīr would arrive with the books—such as the two Ṣaḥīḥs, the works of al-Bayhaqī, and the individual fascicles—but he settled in Marw. I was likewise hoping for the arrival of another of his companions, Yūsuf ibn Fārraw al-Jayyānī, and for the arrival of our companion Abū al-Ḥasan al-Murādī (3), yet I see that none of them has come. There is no choice, then, but to undertake a third journey and procure the books and other essentials.’

He continued: ‘Only a few days passed before Abū al-Ḥasan al-Murādī arrived. My father hosted him in our house, and he had brought with him four large hampers of volumes he had heard read aloud. My father rejoiced greatly at this; Allah spared him the burden of another journey. He turned his full attention to those books: copying, commissioning copies, and collating them. What remained from his own auditions amounted to roughly three hundred fascicles. Abū Saʿd al-Samʿānī helped him with these, transferring a good number to him until no more than about twenty fascicles were left. Whenever a single fascicle reached him, it was as though he had gained the dominion of the whole world (4).’

Ibn al-Najjar said: ‘I read, in the handwriting of Maʿmar ibn al-Fākhir in his Muʿjam: He informed me…’