He was born in Seville and enjoyed special favor with the ruler of the city. His verse was exquisite, of the highest order, and he had memorized the Arabs’ poetry and the accounts of their famous days. Yet he was a dissolute wine-drinker, suspected of subscribing to the creed of the philosophers. When action was about to be taken against him, he fled to al-ʿUdwah (the opposite shore) and attached himself to al-Muʿizz al-ʿUbaydī, who lavished favors upon him. While drinking in the company of certain people he was strangled, in Rajab 362 AH, when he was in his mid-fifties. His collected poems are voluminous, and among them are panegyrics that verge on outright unbelief (1). He is regarded as a peer of al-Mutanabbī, though another report states that he lived only thirty-six years.

89 – al-Sūnākhī, Abū al-Faḍl Ṣiddīq ibn Saʿīd al-Turkī *
The imam and ḥadith scholar Abū al-Faḍl Ṣiddīq ibn Saʿīd al-Turkī al-Sūnākhī—Sūnākh being a village in the district of Ispījāb—left his homeland and, in Bukhārā, studied under Sahl ibn Shādhawayh, Ḥāmid ibn Sahl, and the ḥāfiẓ Ṣāliḥ ibn Muḥammad. In Samarqand he obtained the writings of the jurist Muḥammad ibn Naṣr al-Marwazī. According to Ibn al-Samʿānī in al-Ansāb, he died in Firyāb a little after 350 AH.

90 – al-Farghānī, Abū Muḥammad ʿAbd Allah ibn Aḥmad ibn Jaʿfar **
The emir and scholar Abū Muḥammad ʿAbd Allah ibn Aḥmad ibn Jaʿfar ibn Khudhyan—