—with me as a reinforcement.

On another occasion he said, “The men of speculative theology maintain: ‘There is no Lord in the sky, no Qur’an in the mushaf, and no Prophet in the grave.’ Three disgraceful flaws are yours!”

When one of his opponents once attended his gathering, he mounted the pulpit and recited:

No place has chaste love in our land—
where is al-ʿUdhaib beside the palaces of Babylon? (1)

Then he added—while a man in the audience was seized by ecstatic rapture—“How astonishing! We are all alike when chanting for a lost camel, so why is it that you alone have ‘found’? (2)

I concealed my love until it wasted me away,
and when an illness is hidden, it kills.
Between your eyes lie the tokens of drowsiness—
so leave sleep to the maidens adorned with anklets.”

I have set down a fascicle on the reports of Shaykh Abū al-Faraj in my History of Islam.

Late in his life he was struck by an ordeal: informers denounced him to Caliph al-Nāṣir over a matter whose precise nature is disputed. Agents came, cursed and humiliated him, seized him by hand, put a seal on his house, scattered his family, and then placed him on a boat to the city of Wāsiṭ, where he was confined in a cramped room. He was left to wash his own clothes and cook his own food, and he remained in that state for five years, never once entering a bathhouse.

Arrayed against him was al-Rukn ʿAbd al-Salām ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb, the son of Shaykh ʿAbd al-Qādir. Ibn al-Jawzī, for his part, had not been fair in his treatment of Shaykh ʿAbd al-Qādir.