to speak ill of him—until, he said:

“The last person who transmitted from him through direct audition was our teacher Abū al-Ḥusayn Ibn al-Sarrāj, while the last to receive from him a simple written ijāzah was Abū al-Qāsim Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad al-Balawī.

I add: he possessed a hadith whose chain of transmission contained seven links, passed down through Ibn ʿAṭṭāb, from Ḥakam ibn Muḥammad, from a shaykh, from Abū Khalīfah al-Jumaḥī.

He died—may Allah have mercy on him—on the eighth of Ramadan in the year 578 AH, at the age of eighty-four, and was buried in the cemetery of Córdoba near the grave of the jurist Yaḥyā ibn Yaḥyā al-Laythī.

In that same year (1) there also passed away: the ascetic exemplar, the shaykh of Iraq, Aḥmad ibn ʿAlī ibn al-Rifāʿī, who was approaching eighty years of age; the leading muḥaddith of his day, the preacher of Mosul, ʿAbd Allāh ibn Aḥmad al-Ṭūsī, at ninety-two; the scholar of Damascus, Imām Quṭb al-Dīn Masʿūd ibn Muḥammad al-Naysābūrī al-Shāfiʿī; and the transmitter Abū Ṭālib al-Khaḍir ibn Hibat Allāh ibn Ṭāwūs, the Qur’an-reciter.

Isḥāq ibn Ibrāhīm the reciter told us; ʿAbd al-ʿAẓīm the ḥāfiẓ (2) told us; Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥasan al-Māliqī told us; Khalaf ibn ʿAbd al-Malik told us; ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Muḥammad ibn ʿAṭṭāb—with my reading—told us; Ḥātim ibn Muḥammad told us; Aḥmad ibn Furās al-Makkī narrated to us; Ibrāhīm ibn Raḥmūn al-Sinjārī narrated to us; Muḥammad ibn Maslamah told us; Mūsā al-Ṭawīl narrated to us; my master Anas narrated and said:

The Messenger of Allah ﷺ said: “Blessed is the one who sees me, and the one who sees someone who saw me, and the one who sees someone who saw someone who saw me.”