to the king; indeed, we heard of one ruler who remarked, “This shaykh is my partner in sovereignty.”

He was of medium height, pleasant-faced, with a full beard, slender, fair-skinned, blue-eyed, broad-foreheaded, and with an attractive set of teeth. During his lifetime he married four wives (1) and was blessed with several children. The eldest was ʿUmar—after whom he bore his kunya—and the youngest was ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, later known as Shaykh Shams al-Dīn.

Among his poetry:
“Was it not warning enough against pride that
grey hairs, weakness, and pain have appeared upon my head?
A calamity has struck me which, were I to weep for it
all my life until my tears were spent, still I would find no solace.”

When his son ʿUmar died, he elegized him in a fine urjūzah (2).

After Abū ʿUmar himself passed away, al-Ṣarīfīnī said, “I estimated the crowd at twenty thousand.” I add: Ibn Saʿd and Aḥmad ibn al-Mazdaqānī also composed elegies for him.

He returned to the mercy of Allah on Monday evening, the twenty-eighth of Rabīʿ al-Awwal in the year 607 AH, and I have given a full account of his life in my History of Islam.

2 – Ibn al-Qubayṭī, Muḥammad ibn ʿAlī ibn Ḥamzah al-Baghdādī*
The imam, the reliable narrator, Abū al-Faraj Muḥammad ibn ʿAlī ibn Ḥamzah ibn Fāris, son of