maintaining good works and upright conduct, persevering in worship, frequent in fasting, constant in remembrance, and ever successive in his charities.
Ibn Khallikān (1) said: “He assumed the vizierate at the opening of the year twenty-nine, 629 AH. When Irbil came under the rule of al-Mustansir Billah (2), he kept to his house and acquired a large store of rare books. (3) One night he left his residence and a man struck him on the upper arm with a knife. The surgeon swathed the wound in bandages and he escaped unharmed, whereupon he wrote to King Muẓaffar al-Dīn:
O king whose assaults
Cause even Mars to marvel at their effect!
The signs of your bounty are sent down perfected—
With neither abrogating verse nor one abrogated.
I complain to you of a trial the like of which I have never known,
So hideous that its very mention is a chronicle.
In a single night I was born anew, and my witnesses
To what I claim are the swaddling-band and the poultice.
The Ṣāḥib died on the fifth (4) of Muḥarram, 637 AH.
In that same year there also passed away: the judge of Damascus, Shams al-Dīn Abū al-ʿAbbās Aḥmad ibn al-Khalīl al-Khuwayyi al-Shāfiʿī; al-Ṣafī Aḥmad ibn Abī al-Yusr Shākir al-Tanūkhī; Abū al-ʿAbbās Aḥmad ibn al-Rūmiyya, the Sevillian botanist; Ismāʿīl ibn Muḥammad ibn Yaḥyā al-Baghdādī, the tutor; ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Abū Saʿd Thābit ibn Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad ibn al-Khujandī al-Iṣbahānī—who attended (al-Bukhārī) with Abū al-Waqt; Ḥusayn ibn Yūsuf al-Ṣinhājī al-Shāṭibī, Niẓām al-Dīn, the copyist; and Amīn al-Dīn Sālim ibn