his arrival, and he gathered the ʿUmari clan and said, “What business do I have with your cousin? I put up with him in the Ḥijāz; now he has come to the seat of my authority, intent on corrupting my supporters. Turn him away from me.”

They answered, “He will not listen to us.”

So he wrote to the governor Mūsā ibn ʿĪsā, instructing him to deal gently with the man until he could be sent back.

Muṣʿab al-Zubayrī said: “The ʿUmari was sallow-skinned and thick-set. He would accept nothing from the ruler or from anyone else, and if any of his relatives or acquaintances took office he would cut off relations with him. When his own brother ʿUmar was appointed over Medina and Kerman, he abandoned him. I never met in Medina a man more awe-inspiring than he. Yet he did accept the gift of Ibn al-Mubārak.

“He travelled to Kufa in order to make al-Rashīd fear Allah, and the state trembled at his coming; had an enemy host of one hundred thousand descended upon them, they would not have been more alarmed. He was therefore turned back from Kufa and never reached the caliph.

“It is reported that he frequently kept to the cemetery, carrying a book that he would read, and he would say, ‘Nothing admonishes more than a grave, nothing offers better companionship than a book, and nothing is safer than solitude.’”

ʿUmar ibn Shabba related: Abū Yaḥyā al-Zuhrī told us that the ʿUmari, at the moment of his death, said, “By the favor of my Lord I speak: were the whole world beneath my foot, nothing would prevent me from taking it except having to move that foot—and I have never moved it. All I possess are seven dirhams made from tree bark that I twisted with my own hand.”

Ibn ʿUyaynah said: “I visited the righteous ʿUmari, and he told me, ‘No one is dearer to me than you, yet you have a flaw.’ I asked, ‘What is it?’ He replied, ‘Your love of hadith. Indeed, it is not among the provisions— or, he said, the seasonings—of death.’”

Abū al-Munḏir Ismāʿīl ibn ʿUmar said: I heard Abū ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-ʿUmari the ascetic say, “Part of your heedlessness toward yourself and your turning away from Allah is to witness what angers Him yet pass it by, issuing neither a command nor a prohibition, out of fear of other people. Whoever abandons enjoining what is right because he fears people will have his aura of dignity removed; so much so that, if he were to command his own child, the child would treat him with contempt.”