And from him: “I have never seen anything more effective against plague than violet; it is used as an ointment and it is drunk.” (1)

Ṣāliḥ ibn Muḥammad Jazara said: I heard al-Rabīʿ say—I heard al-Shāfiʿī say: “I know of no branch of knowledge, after the science of what is lawful and unlawful, more noble than medicine; yet the People of the Book have surpassed us in it.”

Harmalah said: Al-Shāfiʿī used to lament what the Muslims had neglected of medicine and would say, “They have squandered one-third of knowledge and consigned it to the Jews and the Christians.” (2)

It is also reported that the Imām once turned to the study of the stars, then abandoned it and repented of it.

Al-Ḥāfiẓ Abū Shaykh related: ʿAmr ibn ʿUthmān al-Makkī narrated to us, Ibn Bint al-Shāfiʿī narrated to us: I heard my father say, “Al-Shāfiʿī—while still a youth—used to study the stars, and whatever discipline he examined he would excel in. One day he was calculating while his wife was in the process of divorce, and he said, ‘She will give birth to a one-eyed girl with a black mole on her private part, and she will die on such-and-such a day.’ She delivered exactly as he had predicted. After that he obliged himself never to look into the subject again and buried those books.” (3)

Fūrān said: I divided the books of the Imām Abū ʿAbd Allāh between his two sons, and among them I found al-Shāfiʿī’s two epistles—the Iraqi and the Egyptian—in Abū ʿAbd Allāh’s own handwriting, may Allah have mercy on him.

Abū Bakr al-Ṣawmaʿī said: I heard Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal say, “A ḥadīth scholar can never have his fill of al-Shāfiʿī’s books.”

ʿAlī ibn Aḥmad al-Dukhamsinī (4) said: I heard ʿAlī ibn Aḥmad ibn al-Naḍr