“…By Allah’s life (1), it was a land of spacious, luxuriant gardens and air so wholesome it even healed the sick. Its birds sang, its trees swayed, its rivers wept, its flowers laughed, and its breeze was pure delight; thus the very temperament of its climate was sound. Their children were already men, their youths were heroes, and their elders were abdāl (saintly substitutes), so their king found it an easy thing to abandon those realms.

He went on to say: ‘O soul, give yourself to passion, otherwise you are numbered with the perishing.’

And further: ‘I passed amid drawn swords, armies in fetters, strings of pearls torn apart, and blood poured out and left unavenged. Were it not for the appointed term, a thousand—or more—would have been added to the thousand already slain.’”

He died on the twentieth of Ramadan in 626 AH, a little over fifty years of age. He endowed his books in Baghdad to the Zaydi Shrine (2), and his writings bear eloquent testimony to his mastery of rhetoric and the depth of his learning. Ibn Khallikān has given a full account of his life and merits.

189 – Ibn Qunaydah, al-Muhadhdhab ibn ʿAlī ibn Hibat Allah al-Azajī*

The upright and trustworthy shaykh, Abū Naṣr al-Muhadhdhab ibn ʿAlī ibn Abī Naṣr Hibat Allah ibn ʿAbd Allah, known as Ibn Qunaydah al-Azajī, the tailor and Qur’an reciter.

He heard: Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, the two books of ʿAbd and al-Dārimī, and the booklet of Abū al-Jahm from Abū al-Waqt.

He also heard the Musnad of al-Shāfiʿī from Abū Zurʿah, and he heard