in its entirety. He then wrote to me in his own hand:

“I deepened my study together with So-and-so by reading the Book of Sibawayh. I reached Alexandria in Ṣafar of the year 604 AH, and that same year I arrived in Mecca during Rajab, where I attended hadith sessions. I next proceeded to Baghdad and remained there for about two years, occupied with the rational sciences. At Wāsiṭ I auditioned the Musnad from Ibn al-Mandāʾī, but he died in the middle of the reading. Thereafter I travelled to Hamadhān in 607 AH, and then to Nīshāpūr and Herat, where I debated al-ʿAmīdī about al-Irshād and conferred with al-Qutb al-Miṣrī. Under al-Muʿīn al-Jājarmī I read his glosses on al-Khilāf. I entered Marw and Isfahān, and in Damascus I went over the Book of Sibawayh with al-Kindī. I have performed the pilgrimage a number of times. I began work on a Qur’an commentary; I have also written al-Dhawābit on grammar, started a book on the Two Fundamentals, and composed a treatise on rhetoric and ornate expression. He dictated to me the Dīwān of al-Mutanabbī….”

Then he said: He recited to me some lines of his own when a discussion arose in his presence about the Divine attributes:

Whoever longs for salvation finds no escape
but in following the Chosen One in all that he brought…

—and he mentioned the remainder of the verses.

He also recited to me:

I confide to you the heart’s searing passion of love
and what those glances have wrought upon my mind;
She lent me the sickness that dwells within her eyelids,
yet now my ailment outstrips her own.

I add: he had many similarly delicate verses, and—may Allah have mercy on him—he was an ocean of knowledge.