and Arabic, and they had studied hadith as well; their names have been recorded in full (1). Among them was Nafiʿ al-Din, who copied for the shaykh more than forty manuscript Qur’an codices and other books, performed the pilgrimage, and was honored with a robe of distinction in the Diwan. The shaykh also maintained more than three hundred tenant-farmers, and he owned several villages and orchards, all of which are mentioned by name.

He was lamented in the following elegy composed by Kamal al-Din Ḥasan ibn Muzaffar al-Shaybani al-Baladi:

Do you not see that the Sword of Truth is now corroded,
That the faith of guidance and the Sacred Law have been bereaved?
The sun of lofty honor and high rank has set,
The light of piety and knowledge has been extinguished.
With the death of the Sword of Guidance and Religion—
The best of those who trod this soil after the Prophet—
The shaykh of the age, Saʿid ibn al-Muṭahhar, has gone—
He to whom seekers of right guidance always turned.
He surpassed mankind in refined qualities;
Who among men possessed what he possessed?
Seventy years he lived in flawless purity,
Never taking a single day for play or jest.
Whoever beheld the fair days he fashioned
Surely beheld the era of the Chosen One and saw it.
With free-flowing speech whose slightest part dispelled disease—
Were a snake-bitten man treated with it, he would recover.
And with fervent exhortation that could melt the stone—
Even a chilled soul, by it alone, would find warmth.
Death is certain; it shakes all humankind
With its fangs, capturing both the lion and the gazelle.
It has spared neither ʿAdnan nor Muḍar,
Nor has it bypassed Qaḥṭan or Sabaʾ.
Would that my ears had been deaf and never heard
The painful news the herald cried of his loss.

(It is a long and splendid poem.)

Nafiʿ al-Hindi told us; Saʿid ibn al-Muṭahhar told us; al-Mu’ayyad al-Tusi told us— and Ibn ʿAsakir also transmitted from al-Mu’ayyad—that al-Sayyidi told us; Saʿid ibn Muhammad told us; Zahir ibn Ahmad told us; Ibrahim al-Hashimi told us; Abu Musʿab related to us; Malik narrated, from