that was threadbare. When one of his students remarked on this, he answered, “My dear fellow, the matter is not about the clothes but about the knowledge beneath them.” Imām al-Shāfiʿī—may Allah have mercy on him—captured the same meaning in his lines:

I wear such garments that, were they all put up for sale,
For a single coin, that coin would be worth more than they.
Yet within them is a soul which, if but a part were weighed,
The souls of all mankind would appear less noble and less great.
What harm befalls a sword’s blade when its sheath is worn?
So long as it is keen, wherever you direct it, it will cut.
If passing days have humbled the state of my attire,
How many a gleaming sword lies broken in its sheath! (1)

When one of his pupils—Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad al-Amīn, who later annotated his Maraqī al-Suʿūd—tried to dissuade him from performing ḥajj in the year he died, fearing for his poor health, he replied, “Give up your efforts. My journey to London in search of treatment must be atoned for with pilgrimage—there is no way around it.”

The Shaykh—may Allah have mercy on him—died leaving nothing of this world’s trappings behind. May Allah envelop him in His vast mercy.

Eleventh: His Writings
The Shaykh—may Allah have mercy on him—left us a collection of works that, in terms of the period in which they were written, fall into three categories:

First category: those he composed in his homeland, namely: