and more than one hundred shaykhs transmitted to me on his authority.

I read, in the hand of ʿUmar b. al-Ḥājib, that al-Silafī’s Muʿjam al-Safar comprises two thousand shaykhs; so he asserted, though I do not think it reaches that number.

Al-Ḥasan b. Aḥmad al-Awqī said: “People used to come to al-Silafī and ask him for a written supplication to ease difficult childbirth, and he would write one for anyone who approached him. When the requests became numerous, I looked at what he was writing and found that he would pen: ‘O Allah, they have formed a good opinion of me; do not let them be disappointed in me.’ ”

He also related: “Sultan Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn and his brother al-Malik al-ʿĀdil attended his gathering to hear hadith. They began speaking with one another, whereupon he showed his displeasure and said, ‘You two are talking while the Prophet’s hadith is being read?!’ At that, they listened attentively.”

I add: The Sultan himself narrated hadith from him.

Al-Ḥāfiẓ Zakī al-Dīn ʿAbd al-ʿAẓīm said: “Al-Silafī was passionately devoted to collecting books and amassing as many as possible; whatever money reached him he spent on buying them. He possessed storehouses full of books yet found no time to consult them. When he died they discovered that most of the volumes in those stores had grown mouldy and stuck together because of Alexandria’s humidity. They had to prise them apart with an axe, and the greater part of them was lost.”

Al-Sayf Aḥmad b. al-Majd, the ḥadith master, said: “I heard Aḥmad b. Salāmah al-Najjār say: The two ḥadith masters ʿAbd al-Ghanī and ʿAbd al-Qādir wanted to hear al-Lālakāʾī’s book—his Explanation of the Sunnah—from al-Silafī, but he kept making excuses, at one time with one pretext and at another with the absence of the archetype, until even his wife spoke to him about it.”

I say: I do not think he ever read the whole book for them—though he did transmit from it the section on the saints’ miracles.

I read in the handwriting of ʿUmar b. al-Ḥājib that al-Silafī’s Muʿjam al-Safar contains