Abu ʿAbd Allah Ibn al-Abbar (1) said: He—may Allah have mercy on him—would unfailingly tell us that seventy was the limit of his life, in accordance with a dream he had seen. He was the last of the hadith masters and men of eloquence in al-Andalus. He fell as a martyr in the incident of Anisha, three farsakhs from Murcia, advancing and never retreating, on the twentieth of Dhu al-Hijjah in the year 634 AH (2).
The hadith scholar Abu Muhammad al-Mundhiri (3) said: He died a martyr at the hands of the enemy.
He added: He was born on the outskirts of Murcia at the beginning of Ramadan in the year 565 AH. He heard hadith in Valencia, Murcia, Játiva, Seville, Granada, Málaga, Dénia, and Ceuta, and he compiled anthologies that testify to the breadth of his learning, the vastness of his memorisation, and his expertise in this field. He wrote to me, granting authorisation, in the year 614 AH.
Abu ʿAbd Allah Muhammad ibn Jabir al-Qaysi informed us; Ahmad ibn Muhammad, the ḥākim of Tunis, informed us (4); the scholar Abu al-Rabīʿ ibn Salim al-Kalaʿi informed us; ʿAbd Allah ibn Muhammad al-Hajari informed us; Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAziz ibn Zughaybah informed us (5); Abu al-ʿAbbas Ahmad ibn ʿUmar al-ʿUdhri informed us; Ahmad ibn al-Hasan al-Razi informed us; Muhammad ibn ʿIsa informed us; Ibrahim ibn Sufyan informed us; Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj narrated to us; ʿAbd Allah ibn Maslamah narrated to us; Aflah ibn Humayd narrated, from al-Qasim, from