Ibn ʿAsākir relates (1) that one day Ashʿab sang before Sālim ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿUmar verses composed by an unknown poet:
A lady of the Mughayra clan—her face shines like the full moon;
her garments are spotless, her piety plentiful. (2)
Her lineage is pure, her honor refined,
and from every loathsome matter she is restrained.
A modest, fair-skinned maiden whom suspicion has never touched,
nor has any poet lured her from the fear of Allah.

Sālim said to him, “Well done—give us more.”
So he sang:
She visited us while the night was dark,
black as the wing of a raven from which the rain had been shaken.
I said, “Has a perfumer alighted in our camp?
For the night has brought us nothing but her fragrance as perfume.”

Sālim replied, “Excellent! Were it not that people would talk, I would have bestowed upon you a lavish reward, for you truly hold an honored place with me.”

In that same year there also died:
Jaʿfar ibn Burqān;
al-Hakam ibn Abān;
ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Zayd ibn Jābir;
Qurra ibn Khālid;
and Abū ʿAmr ibn al-ʿAlāʾ (3), one of the foremost Qurʾān reciters. His kunya is his given name; some say his name was Zabān, but the first opinion is correct.

He is Abū ʿAmr ibn al-ʿAlāʾ ibn ʿAmmār ibn al-ʿUryān ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn al-Ḥuṣayn al-Tamīmī al-Māzinī al-Baṣrī, though other genealogies have also been mentioned. He was the leading scholar of his age in jurisprudence, grammar, and the science of Qurʾān recitation, and he was among the senior scholars who lived by what they knew.

It is said that he once filled an entire house with writings on the speech of the Arabs, then adopted an ascetic life and burned them all; later he returned to his former pursuit, and nothing remained with him save what he had memorized. He had met a great many of the desert Arabs who had lived in pre-Islamic times. He was a recognized authority in the days of al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī and thereafter.

Among his linguistic judgments is his statement—when interpreting the term al-ghurra in the case of a fetus—that it is acceptable only