in the marketplace they would fix their eyes on him; and had he remained in Isfahan for a time and wished to rule it, he would surely have done so.

Al-Ḍiyāʾ said: When he reached Egypt we were living there. Whenever he went out for the Friday prayer we could not walk beside him because of the sheer crowd; people sought blessing through him and thronged around him. We were still young men, writing down hadith in his circle. Once we laughed at something and kept laughing for quite a while; he merely smiled and took no offense at us(1).

He was open-handed and generous, never storing up a single dinar or dirham: whatever came to him he immediately gave away. I heard that he would go out at night carrying baskets of flour to people’s houses, concealing himself in the darkness, giving to them without being recognized. Garments would be sent to him in abundance, yet he would distribute them all while his own cloak remained patched.

My maternal uncle, Shaykh Muwaffaq al-Dīn, said: “The ḥāfiẓ would prefer others to himself with whatever reached his hand, both secretly and openly…,” and he then related several tales of the large sums of dirhams the ḥāfiẓ gave to more than one person.

I also heard Badr ibn Muḥammad al-Jazarī say: “I have never seen anyone more generous than the ḥāfiẓ. I used to borrow money in order to feed the poor, and I still owed a man eighty-nine dirhams. When I was finally ready to repay the debt, I went to him and said, ‘How much do I owe you?’ He replied, ‘You owe me nothing!’ I asked, ‘Who has settled it?’ He said, ‘It has already been paid on your behalf.’ The one who had paid it was the ḥāfiẓ, and he had ordered the man to keep it quiet.”

I heard Sulaymān al-Asʿardī say: “Al-Afḍal, the son of Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn, sent the ḥāfiẓ a large allowance and a great quantity of wheat, and he distributed every last bit of it.”

And I heard Aḥmad ibn ʿAbd Allāh al-ʿIrāqī; Manṣūr al-Ghaḍārī(2) related to me, saying: “I witnessed the ḥāfiẓ during a time of severe inflation in Egypt: for three consecutive nights he gave away his own supper and went to bed hungry.”