The world laughed for them in the days of their dominion—
yet when that dominion was spent, it wailed and wept for them.

Abū ʿAlī al-Qālī (1), author of the Amālī (2), is Ismāʿīl ibn al-Qāsim ibn ʿAydhūn ibn Hārūn ibn ʿĪsā ibn Muḥammad ibn Salmān (3). He is known as al-Qālī the philologist, a client of the Umayyads, for this Salmān had been a mawlā (client) of ʿAbd al-Malik ibn Marwān. The nisba “al-Qālī” is ascribed to Qālī Qalā; some maintain that this is the fortress of Arzan al-Zūm—Allah knows best.

He was born at Manāzijird in the Jazīrah district of Diyār Bakr. He heard hadith from Abū Yaʿlā al-Mawṣilī and others, and he studied grammar and lexicography under Ibn Durayd, Abū Bakr ibn al-Anjari, Nifṭawayh, and additional scholars. He compiled the Amālī, a celebrated work (4), and the Kitāb al-Bāriʿ (5), arranged alphabetically in five thousand folios, along with several other linguistic compositions. After a period in Baghdad, he travelled to Córdoba, arriving there in 330 AH, where he settled permanently and wrote numerous books until his death in that city this very year at the age of sixty-eight, as reported by Judge Ibn Khallikān (6).

In the same year Abū ʿAlī Muḥammad ibn Ilyās, ruler of the province of Kirmān with its lands and revenues, also died. ʿAḍud al-Dawla ibn Rukn al-Dawla then seized Kirmān from Muḥammad ibn Ilyās’s three sons: al-Yasaʿ, [Ilyās] (7), and Sulaymān.

Al-Malik al-Kabīr and Washmgīr likewise passed away, as we have already noted in the record of this year. Among the other kings who died were al-Ḥasan ibn al-Fayrūzān, Muʿizz al-Dawla ibn Būya the Daylamite, and Sayf al-Dawla, lord of Aleppo, as previously mentioned (8).

Ibn al-Athīr states: In this year Naqfūr, king of the Byzantines (9)—that is, the domestikos who held the Armenian territories—also perished, as we have already related.