One day I saw that a gift of apricots had been brought to the ḥāfiẓ’s house and the household began to hand them out. Straightaway he said, “Distribute them!* ‘You will never attain righteousness until you spend of that which you love.’” (1)
Great sums of gold and other valuables came his way, yet he never kept anything. His son Abū al-Fath once said to me, “My father gives the people so much, but he sends nothing to us, and we are in Baghdad.”
What the ḥāfiẓ was tried with:
Al-Ḍiyāʾ said: I heard Abū Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Jabbār relate that he heard the ḥāfiẓ say, “I asked Allah to grant me a state like that of Imām Aḥmad. He granted me his prayer; then afterwards I was tested and harmed.”
I heard Imām ʿAbd Allāh ibn Abī al-Ḥasan al-Jubbāʾī (2) in Isfahan say: “Abū Nuʿaym (3) had taken Ibn Manda (4) to task for matters in his Book of the Companions. Ḥāfiẓ Abū Mūsā (5) wanted to do the same to Abū Nuʿaym regarding his own book on the Companions, but he did not dare. When Ḥāfiẓ ʿAbd al-Ghanī arrived, he pointed this out to him, so he recorded about two hundred and ninety points against Abū Nuʿaym. When the dignitary al-Khujandī (6) heard of this…"