that he was not extreme in his Shīʿī sympathies. Anyone who attains the level of memorization and mastery of reports reached by Ibn ʿUqda and yet harbors rancor in his heart toward the earliest forerunners of Islam is either a stubborn partisan or a heretic—Allah knows best.

Through this same chain, al-Ḥāfiẓ Abū Bakr said: “The father of Abū al-ʿAbbās was nicknamed ‘ʿUqda’ because of his expertise in morphology and grammar.

He worked as a copyist in Kūfa and taught the Quran and Arabic literature. (1) The judge Abū al-ʿAlāʾ informed me; Muḥammad ibn Jaʿfar ibn al-Najjār narrated, saying:

Abū ʿAlī al-Naqqār related to us: ‘Some gold dinars slipped from ʿUqda, so he brought a flour-sifter (nakhkhāl) to look for them. ʿUqda said, “I found them, then reflected and said, ‘Is there nothing in the world but your dinars?’” So I told the sifter, “They are entrusted to you,” and I left him.’ (2)

He used to tutor the son of Hishām the silk-merchant. When the boy became proficient, his father sent him a respectable sum of dinars, but ʿUqda returned it. Ibn Hishām assumed the amount seemed too small, so he doubled it. ʿUqda replied, ‘I did not return it out of dissatisfaction; rather, the boy asked me to teach him the Quran, so the teaching of grammar became mingled with the teaching of the Quran. I do not consider it lawful to accept anything from him, even if he were to give me the whole world.’ (3)

Ibn al-Najjār added: ‘ʿUqda was a Zaydī, pious and ascetic. He was called “ʿUqda” because of his intricate analyses in morphology. He was a bookseller with elegant handwriting, and his son was the finest hadith memorizer of our age.’ (4)

Abū Aḥmad al-Ḥākim said: Ibn ʿUqda told me, ‘al-Bardījī entered Kūfa…’ (5)