on knowledge and its devotees, literature and its connoisseurs, and horsemanship and its champions.

His father left him a considerable estate in cash and livestock, and he had no children other than him.

The Shaykh—may Allah have mercy on him—speaks of a slice of his childhood:

“I was more inclined to play than to study until I had memorized the alphabet. They then began teaching it to me with the vowel signs—ba with a fatḥa, ‘ba’; ba with a kasra, ‘bi’; ba with a ḍamma, ‘bu,’ and so on. So I asked them, ‘Are all the letters like that?’ They said, ‘Yes.’ I replied, ‘That is enough; I can read them all that way,’ hoping they would let me go. They said, ‘Read them, then.’ I recited three or four letters and continued to the very end in that fashion. They realized I had grasped the underlying rule, were satisfied with me, and left me alone—after which reading became dear to me.”

When he turned ten he finished memorizing the Noble Quran under his maternal uncle ʿAbd Allah ibn Muḥammad al-Mukhtār ibn Ibrāhīm ibn Aḥmad Nūḥ.

Third: His Pursuit of Knowledge

After completing the memorization of the Quran at the age of ten, he studied the ʿUthmānic orthography of the muṣḥaf with his cousin, Sayyidi Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad al-Mukhtār. With him he also mastered tajwīd in the reading of Nāfiʿ—specifically the transmission of Warsh through the route of Abū Yaʿqūb al-Azraq, and of Qālūn as narrated by Abū Nashīṭ—obtaining from him an isnād that reaches back to the Prophet ﷺ. At that time he was sixteen years old.

During that same period he likewise studied several concise manuals of jurisprudence under—