He said: Ḥusn came to me and said, “A man has arrived with a satchel(1) containing dried fruit and a letter.” I rose and read the letter. It said:
“O Abū ʿAbd Allāh, I invested some goods for you in Samarkand, made a profit, and have forwarded to you four thousand coins together with fruit I picked myself from an orchard I inherited from my father.”

He continued: I gathered the children, we went inside, and I wept, saying, “Father, will you not show me mercy so that I need not eat from zakah?” Then he uncovered the children’s heads and I wept again. He said, “How did you come to know about this? Leave me until I perform istikhāra (seek Allah’s guidance) tonight.”

The next morning he said, “I asked Allah for guidance and He has directed me not to accept it.” He opened the satchel, distributed its contents among the children, and—having a robe of ʿushārī cloth—sent the robe to the man and returned the money.

ʿAbd Allāh ibn Aḥmad said: I heard Furān say: “Abū ʿAbd Allāh fell ill and people came to visit him—this was before 200 AH. ʿAlī ibn al-Jaʿd also visited him and left a purse at his bedside. I asked him about it and he said, ‘I did not see it; go and return it to him.’”

Abū Bakr ibn Shādhān said: Abū ʿĪsā Aḥmad ibn Yaʿqūb narrated to us; Fāṭima, daughter of Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal, told me: “A fire broke out in my brother Ṣāliḥ’s house. He had just married a young woman and they had brought her furnishings worth nearly four thousand dinars; the fire consumed them. Ṣāliḥ kept saying, ‘Nothing grieves me of what was lost except a robe that belonged to my father and in which he used to pray; I sought blessing through it and prayed in it myself.’

“When the fire was extinguished and they went in, they found the robe on a bed; the flames had consumed everything around it, yet it remained unharmed.”

Ibn al-Jawzī said: I was informed by the Chief Judge ʿAlī ibn al-Ḥusayn al-Zaynabī that a fire once broke out in their house and burned everything in it except a book that contained something written in Imam Aḥmad’s own hand.

He added: And when the great flood struck Baghdad in the year 554 AH and the city was submerged