within me is a zeal for knowledge such as can scarcely be matched—
it is that very zeal which has brought on this wasting away.
Though fashioned from a mere clot, it aspired to the loftiest aims;
invited to attain perfection, it hastened to comply.
How many a gathering I held whose atmosphere,
were it to be likened to anything, would be likened to Paradise!
I yearn for it now that its days have slipped away untended;
who would blame a she-camel if she cried out in longing?
O, shall the nights at Jamʿ ever return?
Will there be so much as a single glance at the valley of Mina?
They were sweeter than the shifting dawn breeze
and dearer than a dove singing among the branches.
In them arose impromptu insights
that no one attains save after long brewing and overnight reflection—
and other verses besides.
He then stepped down, fell ill for five days, and died on the night preceding Friday, between the sunset and night prayers, the 13th of Ramadan in the year 597 AH, at his house in Qaṭuftā.
My mother told me that she heard him say shortly before his death, “What am I to do with peacocks?”—he kept repeating it—“You have brought me these peacocks.”
Our shaykh Ibn Sukaynah attended the washing of his body at the pre-dawn hour. The markets were closed, the people thronged in, and his son Abū al-Qāsim ʿAlī led the funeral prayer over him by chance, for the dignitaries were unable to reach him. He was then carried to the Manṣūr Mosque, where another prayer was performed, but the place proved too small for the crowds. It was a day long remembered. He was not brought to his grave in the Aḥmad cemetery until the time of the Friday prayer. It was the month of Tammūz; many people broke their fast, and some even threw themselves into the water … until he said:
Hardly any of the shroud remained by the time he reached the grave—so he said, and the responsibility for that report rests with him (1). He was lowered into the pit while the muʾadhdhin was proclaiming, “Allah is the Greatest,” and the people were overcome with grief for him,