in ordered verse and with meticulous precision it rises in lofty rank, prevailing—despite every detractor. (1)

Abu al-Husayn ibn al-Faqih (2) and Abu ʿAli al-Qalansi recited to us; they said: Abu al-Fadl al-Hamdani recited to us, and Abu Tahir al-Salafi recited to us on his own behalf:

The beauty of a hadith, in the eyes of the critics versed in its science,
Is not that its narrators are few and near;
Rather, the true elevation of a hadith—according to those of exactitude and firm memorization—
Lies in the soundness of its isnad.
When both virtues unite in a single report,
Seize it, for that is the utmost aspiration.

We have already noted his year of birth only approximately. The hadith scholar Muhammad b. ʿAbd al-Rahman b. ʿAli al-Tujibi al-Andalusi said: “I heard from al-Salafi, and I found it recorded in his own handwriting: ‘My birth was in Isfahan, in 472 AH—an estimate, not a certainty.’ ”

This is supported by what was related earlier from al-Sakhawi, though the stronger evidence points the other way, for he said that people took dictation from him while he was still beardless, and he also said that he remembered the assassination of Nizam al-Mulk.

Qadi Shams al-Din Ahmad b. Khallikan (3) said: “His birth was in Isfahan, about the year 472 AH.” He added, “I found the scholars of Egypt—and among the hadith specialists, al-Hafiz al-Mundhiri was one of them—making this very statement about al-Salafi’s birth. Later I came across, in the book Zahr al-Riyad by Abu al-Qasim Ibn al-Saffarawi, that al-Salafi himself used to say: ‘My birth—by conjecture, not with certainty—was in the year 478 AH.’ ”

On that reckoning, his lifespan would have been eighty-nine years.

Ibn Khallikan then said: “I also saw in the History of Ibn al-Najjar something that indicates the correctness of what…"