…as well as Imam al-Din ʿAbd al-ʿAziz b. Yahya, who died in 699 AH/1299 CE, and Bahaʾ al-Din Yusuf b. Yahya, who died in 685 AH/1286 CE. (1) According to the standard chronicles, Aleppo was conquered in Safar 579 AH/1183 CE, while the Holy City of Jerusalem—may God restore it—was taken in Rajab 583 AH/1187 CE. (2) Ibn Khallikan spells the name explicitly: an open b, a doubled r, then a j, and after the alif a n. He identifies the man as Abu al-Hakam ʿAbd al-Salam b. ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Lakhmi, notes his death in Marrakesh in 536 AH/1141 CE, and records that he authored a Qurʾanic tafsir (mystical commentary). See Wafayat, vol. 4, p. 237. (3) Wafayat, vol. 4, p. 230. (4) It is reported that this Ibn Barrajan forecast the liberation of Jerusalem for the year 583 AH/1187 CE, a claim so widely circulated that the martyred sultan Nur al-Din was said to hope to live until that date so the victory might occur at his hands. Consult Ibn Khallikan’s doubts about Ibn Barrajan’s prediction and even whether he uttered it at all. Ibn Khallikan writes: “Someone asked Muhyi al-Din, ‘Whence did you learn this?’ He replied, ‘I derived it from Ibn Barrajan’s tafsir of the verse: alif-lam-mim. “The Byzantines have been defeated in the nearest land, yet after their defeat they will be victorious within a few years.”’ When I later examined the passage and the anecdote, I kept searching until I found Ibn Barrajan’s commentary in this very form, but the relevant section was written in the margin in a hand different from the main text. I cannot tell whether it belonged to the original or was later appended. A long numerical computation was included explaining how the date was extracted from the phrase ‘within a few years.’” See also the marginal note in the Mukhtar edition of Wafayat al-Aʿyan, reproduced by the meticulous editor Dr. Ihsan ʿAbbas, which supports Ibn Khallikan’s remarks (Wafayat, vol. 4, p. 230, n. 2).