He also held the ḥisbah (market inspectorate) of Damascus and the shaykhdom of the khawāniq (Sufi lodges), and his reputation prospered under the rule of al-Muʿaẓẓam.

His grandfather ʿAmrūk ibn Muḥammad had been a native of the Prophet’s City, Medina, but later moved and settled in Nishapur.

Abū ʿAlī suffered from paralysis for a time. In the last years of his life he relocated to Egypt, yet his stay there was brief, and he died on 11 Dhū al-Ḥijjah in the year 656 AH. He was neither exceptional in memorization nor notably precise.

Ibn al-Hājib said: “He was an imam, a scholar, articulate and eloquent, of pleasing appearance, yet much given to calumny and to making extravagant claims. He was fond of joking and frivolity, mixed with the emirs, and assumed the ḥisbah …” until he concluded, “He was not praiseworthy: he restored injustices and had a foul tongue.”

I asked the ḥāfiẓ Ibn ʿAbd al-Wāḥid about him, and he said: “I was informed that when he read before the shaykhs, if he met a difficult word he would pass it over without clarifying it.” I also asked Abū ʿAbd Allāh al-Birzālī, who said: “He used to confuse matters frequently.”

I (the author) say: He transmitted Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, the Musnad of Abū ʿAwānah, Ibn Ḥibbān’s al-Anwāʿ, and other works; Ibn al-Zarrād was his most prolific transmitter.

Abū Muḥammad al-Jazāʾirī informed me that he read to Abū ʿAlī al-Bakrī The Forty Narrations on Cities, composed by al-Bakrī, in which the latter states: “During my journeys and travels I visited more than one hundred and sixty towns and villages. I compiled for them a separate geographical index. When some students asked me for forty hadiths relating to cities, I assembled them from forty great metropolises, each ḥadith reported by forty Companions and transmitted by forty Successors—yes.”

He also extracted a set of forty ḥadiths from among forty collections of forty ḥadiths, and he produced an abridgement of al-Nasāʾī’s Kitāb al-Kunā.

And his brother died