Adding a yāʾ gives the form al-Saylaqī: Ismāʿīl ibn ʿAlī al-Saylaqī, one of the foremost shaykhs from whom al-Silafī—the subject of this biography—took knowledge.

The ḥadīth master Abū Ṭāhir was born in the year seventy-five [475 AH], or perhaps a year earlier. This agrees with what Abū al-Ḥasan Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad al-Qaṭīʿī records in his History, where he says:

“I heard the ḥadīth master ʿAbd al-Ghanī ibn ʿAbd al-Wāḥid, after his return from visiting al-Silafī, say: ‘I asked him about his birth. He replied, “I remember the assassination of Niẓām al-Mulk—the vizier who endowed the Niẓāmiyyah Madrasa in Baghdad—and at the time I was about ten years old; Niẓām al-Mulk was killed in 485 AH. People began writing down ḥadīth from me in Isfahān at the beginning of 492 AH, when I was seventeen years old, give or take a little, and there was not a single hair on my face, just like al-Bukhārī, may Allah have mercy on him.”’”

That is to say, when they first wrote from him.

Imām Abū Shāmah (1) said: “I heard our teacher ʿAlam al-Dīn al-Sakhāwī relate: ‘One day I heard Abū Ṭāhir al-Silafī recite, for his own benefit, some verses he had composed long ago:

I belong to the folk of ḥadīth—
the finest company by far;
I have crossed ninety years,
and I hope to cross the full hundred.’

It was said to him, ‘Allah has indeed fulfilled your hope.’ From this I knew that he had already passed a hundred years of age, and that was in 572 AH.”

More than one authority affirms that al-Silafī lived beyond a century, and his distinguished pupil ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz ibn ʿĪsā (2) even declared: “He died at the age of one hundred and six.”