They replied, “Yes.”
As she was walking along she caught sight of a shammās (1) and said, “That is my son.” They therefore brought him to ʿAbdah.
He asked him, “Are you really defying your mother?”
He answered, “She is not my mother.”
ʿAbdah said, “And you deny her as well? Beat him, then seat her on his shoulders, and have it proclaimed about him: ‘This is the recompense of anyone who mistreats his mother.’”
One of the young man’s companions saw him and asked, “What is this?”
He answered, “Whoever has no mother should go to ʿAbdah—he will appoint one for him.”
- Al-Qaṭṭān, Abū al-Ḥasan ʿAlī ibn Ibrāhīm ibn Salamah*
The imam, ḥāfiẓ, exemplar, and Shaykh al-Islam: Abū al-Ḥasan ʿAlī ibn Ibrāhīm ibn Salamah ibn Baḥr al-Qazwīnī, known as al-Qaṭṭān, the foremost scholar of Qazwin.
Birth: 254 AH.
He studied under Abū ʿAbd Allāh Ibn Mājah (from whom he heard the Sunan), Muḥammad ibn al-Faraj al-Azraq, Abū Ḥātim al-Rāzī, Ibrāhīm ibn Dayzil, al-Ḥārith ibn Abī Usāmah, al-Qāsim ibn Muḥammad al-Dallāl, Yaḥyā ibn ʿAbdak al-Qazwīnī, Isḥāq ibn Ibrāhīm al-Dabarī, and al-Ḥasan ibn ʿAbd al-Aʿlā al-Bawsī—he met the last two in Yemen—along with others of that rank.
He gathered hadith, composed works, mastered various sciences, and persisted in acts of devotion.
Those who narrated from him include: al-Zubayr ibn ʿAbd al-Wāḥid the ḥāfiẓ; Abū al-Ḥasan the grammarian; Abū al-Ḥusayn Aḥmad ibn Fāris the lexicographer; Aḥmad ibn ʿAlī ibn Lāl; Abū Saʿīd ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Muḥammad al-Qazwīnī; al-Qāsim ibn Abī al-Mundhir al-Khaṭīb; and Aḥmad.
(1) A shammās was a kind of police orderly or guard in early Islamic usage.