219 – Al-Faḍl ibn Yaʿqūb related to us; he said: ʿAbd Allāh ibn Jaʿfar al-Raqqī told me; he said: Abū al-Malīḥ narrated, from Furāt ibn Muslim, who said:

“I used to present my ledgers to ʿUmar ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz every Friday. On one occasion I laid them before him and he removed from them a sheet of paper roughly four fingers wide and wrote on it some instruction. I thought to myself, ‘The Commander of the Believers must have been inattentive.’

The next morning he sent word: ‘Bring me your ledgers.’ So I brought them. He then dispatched me on an errand, and when I returned he said, ‘Why should we not look through them?’ I replied, ‘Did you not look through them yesterday?’ He said, ‘Go on; I shall summon you.’

When my ledgers were opened, I found inside them a sheet exactly the same size as the one he had taken