for four dirhams. I spent half a dirham on meat, and he gave the cupper one dirham. She added, “I also bought some perfume for a dirham.
When he set out for Samarra (Surr Man Raʾā), I had already spun a soft thread and made a fine garment. When he returned, I brought it out to him. I had previously received fifteen dirhams from renting it out of the income, but when he looked at it he said, ‘I do not want it.’
I said, ‘My master, I have something else besides this.’
So I handed the garment to Furān, who sold it for forty-two dirhams. Later I spun a large piece of cloth, and he said, ‘Do not cut it; leave it as it is.’ It became his shroud.
The eldest of Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal’s children was Ṣāliḥ. He served as the judge of Isfahan and died there in 265 AH, a little over sixty years old. He narrated from Abū Walīd al-Ṭayālisī and other senior authorities.
Ṣāliḥ left two sons. One was Zuhayr ibn Ṣāliḥ, a trustworthy hadith scholar, who died in 303 AH. The other was Aḥmad ibn Ṣāliḥ— I do not know when he died— from whom his own son Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad ibn Ṣāliḥ transmitted. Muḥammad died in 330 AH, still a man in his prime.
The second of Aḥmad’s children was the ḥāfiẓ Abū ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ʿAbd Allāh ibn Aḥmad, his father’s principal transmitter and one of the foremost imams. He died in 290 AH at the age of seventy-seven; I have devoted a separate entry to him.
The third was Saʿīd ibn Aḥmad, born to Aḥmad fifty days before his death. He grew up, studied jurisprudence, and died before his brother ʿAbd Allāh.
As for Ḥasan, Muḥammad, and Zaynab, nothing about their circumstances has reached us, and, so far as we know, Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal left no surviving descendants.