Al-Kisāʾī passed away in this very year, according to the most widely accepted view, at the age of seventy. He was in the company of Hārūn al-Rashīd in the district of al-Rayy, and he and Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥasan died there on the same day. Al-Rashīd would remark, “In Rayy I buried both jurisprudence and the Arabic language.”
Ibn Khallikān (1) reports another opinion: that al-Kisāʾī died at Ṭūs in 182 AH—some say 183 AH. Allah knows best.
Someone once saw al-Kisāʾī in a dream, his face radiant like the full moon. He was asked, “How did your Lord deal with you?” He replied, “He forgave me because of the Qur’an.” I then asked, “And what of Ḥamzah?” He said, “He is in ʿIlliyyīn; we behold him only as one beholds a distant star.”
In the same year Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥasan ibn Farqad (2), Abū ʿAbd Allah al-Shaybānī—the close disciple of Abū Ḥanīfah—also died. His roots lay in a village near Damascus; his father later moved to Iraq, and Muḥammad was born in Wāsiṭ in 132 AH and reared in Kufah. He studied under Abū Ḥanīfah, Misʿar, Sufyān al-Thawrī, ʿUmar ibn Dharr, and Mālik ibn Mighwal, and he recorded hadith from Mālik ibn Anas, al-Awzāʿī, and Abū Yūsuf. He settled in Baghdad and taught there; al-Shāfiʿī took notes from him when he arrived in 184 AH. Hārūn al-Rashīd appointed him judge of al-Raqqah and later dismissed him. He accompanied the caliph to al-Rayy, where he died.
He used to say to his family, “Do not ask me for any worldly need lest you distract my heart. Take whatever you wish from my belongings; that lightens my worries and frees my heart.”
Al-Shāfiʿī said, “I have never seen a scholar of such corpulence, yet lighter of spirit, nor one more eloquent; whenever I heard him recite the Qur’an, it was as though the Qur’an were being revealed in his very dialect.”
He also said, “I have never seen anyone more intelligent than he; he filled both the eye and the heart.”
Al-Ṭaḥāwī relates: “Al-Shāfiʿī asked Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥasan to lend him his Kitāb al-Siyar (Book on Military Conduct), but he refused. So al-Shāfiʿī wrote to him:”