Among his poetry:
If hardship visits me, my companion never knows;
and when I prosper, my friend prospers too.
My modesty preserves the water of my face,
and the gentleness of my asking is itself my ally.
Had I been willing to squander my dignity,
the road to wealth would have been easy for me. (1)

More of his verse:
Two traits whose paths I shall never approve:
the swagger of wealth and the abasement of poverty.
So, if you are rich, do not grow arrogant,
and if you become poor, then vanquish fate. (2)

He passed away at the time of Maghrib on the evening of Sunday, with two days of Shawwal remaining in the year 310 AH. He had passed eighty by five or six years, and much of the hair on his head and beard was still black. He was buried in his own house because some rabble among the common Hanbalis prevented his burial during daylight, accusing him of Shi‘ism; other ignoramuses even branded him an unbeliever. Far is he from either charge! Rather, he was one of the Imams of Islam in mastery (3) of the Book of Allah and the Sunnah of His Messenger. They had merely inherited those accusations from Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Dawud (4), who used to malign him with grave charges and label him a Rafidi.

When he died, people from every quarter of the city assembled, performed the funeral prayer for him in his house, and he was interred there. For months thereafter people continued to visit his grave, praying for him—may Allah have mercy on him.

I say: I have seen a work of his in which he gathered the hadiths of Ghadir Khumm (5) in two large volumes, and another in which he collected the various chains for the Hadith of the Bird (6). It has also been attributed to him that he held the permissibility of wiping over the feet in wuduʾ, without requiring washing, and this view became widely known from him.

Consequently, some scholars claim that there were two men named Ibn Jarir: one who was Shiʿite—thus the view is ascribed to him—thereby exonerating this Abu Jaʿfar from such descriptions. What is relied upon from his words in the Tafsir is that he deems washing the feet obligatory, together with rubbing them while washing; he merely expressed the rubbing by the term “wiping,” and many of