a man of ardent, aching love: at every moment he has a beloved, and from every kind of beauty he takes a share.

He journeyed to Khurasan, then made his way to Baghdad; he resided in Damascus and Aleppo, and I met him in Mosul. After that he followed the One he loved all the way to Tayyiba (Medina). He told me that he had been born in Murcia in the year seventy, to a family of rank and dignity. He later moved to Egypt, where he adhered to piety and seclusion. He possessed an ample share of the sciences and spoke on them with sound judgment and a penetrating intellect.

He further informed me, in 626 AH, that he had recited the Quran to Ghalabun ibn Muhammad al-Mursi, a student of Ibn Hadhayl, and to ʿAli ibn al-Sharik (1). He also studied jurisprudence, grammar, and legal theory. In 590 AH he travelled to Malaga and read under Abu Ishaq ibn Ibrahim ibn Yusuf ibn Dahhaq, known as Ibn al-Marʾa.

He said, “In al-Andalus there was no one in his craft like him. He mastered Qur’anic exegesis and the sciences of the Sufis; had he asserted that a single verse carried a thousand possible interpretations, he could have explained them all. I never heard anything without memorizing it.” He also studied under Abu ʿAbd Allah al-Shawdi al-Tilimsani, the righteous.

Yaqut (2) said: Sharf al-Din related to me, saying that Ibn Dahhaq told him:

“I memorized the Quran while still a youth, along with several books—among them al-Ghazali’s The Revival of the Religious Sciences. I then travelled to Tlemcen, where I used to see a shabby, short man, no more than a cubit in height. He would take up his basket and carry fish for hire, and no one had ever seen him pray. One day I happened to pass by while he was praying; when he noticed me, he cut the prayer short and began to fidget. Then the festival day came, and I found him in the prayer-ground. I said to myself, ‘I shall take him with me and feed him.’

But he forestalled me, saying, ‘I have beaten you to it—come to me.’

So I went with him to the cemetery, where he produced steaming-hot food, the sort eaten only on feast days. I was astonished, yet I ate. Then he began to relate my own circumstances to me as though he had lived them with me. Whenever I prayed, a light would seem to appear at my feet, and he said to me, ‘You are self-impressed, thinking yourself something; no, not until you read…’