was seated there, his scribe at his side. So we said, “Let us seek the reward of God and approach him, and one of us will lodge a claim against the other.”

I therefore alleged, “I heard this ḥadith in his book, yet he refuses to let me see my certificate of audition.” The judge fell silent for a moment, then asked the defendant, “With your permission—did he indeed listen to the reading in your book?”

“Yes,” the man replied.

“Then lend him his certificate,” the judge ruled.

Al-Ḥākim also said: I heard my father relate: “Throughout his life al-Qāḍī Muḥammad ibn ʿAlī al-Marwazī lived in the house of Ibn Ḥamdūn opposite our own. I used to see him sewing at night—and whenever he found a free moment by day—for orphans and the poor, counting that as an act of charity.”

I heard Muḥammad ibn ʿAbdān, the caretaker of the Congregational Mosque, say: “Every week Muḥammad ibn ʿAlī the judge would come to the mosque for one night and worship until dawn, without anyone but me knowing. One night I found him reciting, ‘And whoever does not judge by what Allah has revealed, such people are the disbelievers’ (Q 5:44) and the following verses. Each time he finished a verse he struck his chest with his hand so forcefully that I could hear the sound—may Allah Most High have mercy on him.”

He died sometime after 320 AH at a little over eighty years of age.

324 – Ibn Qutaybah, Aḥmad ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn Muslim al-Baghdādī

Chief Judge of Egypt: Abū Jaʿfar Aḥmad ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn Muslim ibn Qutaybah al-Baghdādī, the chancery clerk.