One day, while he was seated in his teaching circle, a legal question concerning ʿUthmān—may Allah be pleased with him—was brought to him. He took the question and, right there in our presence, wrote from memory a lengthy scroll in which he set out the Caliph’s lineage, place of birth, year of death, offspring, the assessments made about him, and much more besides.

He produced works on hadith, on asceticism and heart-softening counsels, and he compiled the book “Zād al-Musāfir” in fifty volumes. In hadith and its sciences he was an unrivalled imam.

In Qur’an readings he achieved so much that he authored separate works on the ten canonical readings (1) and on the individual variants; he also wrote treatises on pausing and resuming, on tajwīd, on the occurrences of the word mā in the Qur’an, on verse enumeration, and a biographical dictionary of the reciters running to about twenty volumes. His writings were highly praised, copied, and carried to Khwārazm and to Greater Syria, and many students under his tutelage became masters of the variant readings.

Whenever the names of the reciters were mentioned he would say: “So-and-so died in such-and-such a year; so-and-so passed away in the year such-and-such; and so-and-so’s chain of transmission is higher than that of so-and-so by such and such.”

He was a scholar and an imam in grammar and lexicography. I was told that among the works he had learnt by heart was the book “al-Jamhara.”

Pupils of his produced texts in Arabic and became leading teachers in Hamadhān; I met some of his companions, and among the books they had memorised was “al-Gharībayn” by Abū ʿUbayd al-Harawī … until he said:

He had little regard for wealth. Though he came from a family of merchants, he sold everything he inherited and spent it in the quest for knowledge, travelling to Baghdad and to Isfahān several times on foot, carrying his books on his back. I heard him say, “I used to sleep in the mosques of Baghdad and live on millet bread.”

He also said: I heard Abū al-Faḍl ibn Bunaymān, the man of letters, say: “I saw Abū al-ʿAlāʾ al-ʿAṭṭār in one of the mosques of Baghdad writing while standing, because the lamp was hung too high ….”