those wounds. He looked at them and asked, “Has it not yet been lanced?”

He kept coming to him and treating him. More than one lash had struck his face, and he lay flat on it for as long as Allah willed. Then the doctor said to him, “There is something here I need to cut away.” He brought an iron tool, hooked the flesh with it, and sliced it off with a knife he had. Aḥmad endured it patiently, voicing praise of Allah aloud throughout, and the place healed. Even so, he continued to feel pain in certain spots, and the marks of the flogging were clearly visible on his back until he passed away.

I went in to see him one day and said, “I have heard that a man came to you and said, ‘Put me in ḥill (absolve me), for I did not stand up in your defense.’ You replied, ‘I will not put anyone in ḥill.’”

My father smiled and kept silent (1). Later I heard him say, “I have in fact put the deceased in ḥill for the beating he gave me.”

He then said, “I came across this verse: ‘But whoever pardons and makes things right—his reward rests with Allah’ (Ash-Shūrā 40). I looked into its commentary and found it to be exactly what Hāshim b. al-Qāsim related to us from al-Mubārak b. Faḍālah, who said:

‘Someone who heard al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī told me that he said: When the Day of Resurrection comes, all nations will be kneeling before Allah, Lord of the worlds. Then a caller will announce: Let none stand except those whose reward is due from Allah. No one will rise except those who pardoned in the world.’”

He said, “So I absolved the deceased. And what would it cost a man to ensure that Allah punishes no one on his account?”

With this same chain, Ibn Abī Ḥātim said: Aḥmad b. Sinān narrated to me, saying, “It has reached me that Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal put al-Muʿtaṣim in ḥill on the day the capital of Bābak fell (2) and he captured him, or on the…"