Al-Muwaffaq ʿAbd al-Laṭīf said: Al-ʿAzīz was a young man, handsome in appearance, refined in manners, strong, powerful, quick-moving, modest, generous, and chaste with respect to both wealth and sexual matters. His munificence reached the point that he no longer possessed a single treasury, private reserve, birka (ornamental pool), or even a horse of his own. The houses of his emirs overflowed with every kind of bounty. He was courageous and ever forward. So great was his chastity that he owned a Turkish slave worth one thousand dinars by the name of Abū Shāmah; when he paused before him, struck by the youth’s beauty, he ordered him to remove his clothes and sat with him in an indecent posture, but then divine grace overtook him. He hurried to one of his concubines and satisfied his desire with her… until he went on to say:
“As for his restraint regarding money, I cannot begin to relate all the stories that bear witness to it.”
Ibn Wāṣil (1) said: The subjects loved him with an intense and overwhelming affection, and their hopes were pinned on his filling his father’s place. When his brother al-Afḍal set out with al-ʿĀdil and they encamped at Bilbays, and the situation grew unstable, the populace offered him their wealth, but he refused.
Ibn Wāṣil (2) also said: It is reported that ʿAbd al-Karīm ibn al-Baysānī, the brother of al-Qāḍī al-Fāḍil, had governed al-Buḥayrah for a time and had amassed (3); a quarrel then arose between him and his brother, so he was removed from office. He had married the daughter of Ibn Maysar, but his bad temperament led him to mistreat her. Her father therefore came forward and proved before the judge of Alexandria that she had been harmed and that he had confined her in a room. The judge went in person, tried to open the door but could not, so he brought a mason, broke through the wall, took her out, and then sealed the breach. ʿAbd al-Karīm raged, went to the amir Jahārkas in Egypt, and said, “Here are five thousand dinars for you and forty thousand dinars for the sultan, and I shall take the judgeship of Alexandria.” He then went to al-ʿAzīz by night and produced