Saʿīd ibn Abī al-Saʿādāt al-Wāsiṭī, the grammarian, who was blind.
He had memorised the Qur’an and recited it in the various canonical readings before a group of teachers.
He travelled to Baghdad while still a young man and heard hadith from Abū Zurʿah al-Maqdisī, Yaḥyā ibn Thābit, Aḥmad ibn al-Mubārak al-Muraqqaʿātī, and Abū Muḥammad ibn al-Khashshāb; he then remained with the last of these for Arabic studies.

Ibn al-Najjār said: He studied adab under Abū Saʿīd Naṣr ibn Muḥammad, the tutor. He came to Baghdad with his father, settled there, and pursued adab with Ibn al-Khashshāb. He also recited a number of works on grammar, philology, and poetry to Abū al-Barakāt al-Anbārī entirely from memory. He told me that he likewise recited half of Sībawayh’s Kitāb from memory to him, and that each day he would memorise a booklet on grammar, grasp its contents, and debate over it until he mastered the subject. He would frequent the homes of dignitaries to teach adab. He possessed keen intelligence, a penetrating understanding, and an immense store of memorised material, and he was versed in many disciplines: grammar, language, morphology, prosody, poetic semantics, Qur’anic exegesis; he also knew jurisprudence, medicine, astronomy, and the sciences of the ancients.

I remarked: Had he remained ignorant of those last two sciences he would have been happier. (1)

He added: He composed both poetry and prose, could draft sermons and letters effortlessly and without deliberation, and he spoke Turkish, Persian, Greek, Armenian, Abyssinian, Hindi, and Zanj with fluent speech