Bahāʾ al-Dawlah, for five months. He also composed poetry and died in Shaʿbān of this year.

Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad ibn Ibrāhīm, Abū al-Faraj, (1) better known as Ghulām al-Shanabūdhī, was learned in the Qurʾānic readings and their interpretation. It is said that he had memorised fifty thousand verses of poetry (2) to serve as linguistic proofs for the Qurʾān. Even so, people criticised him and his narrations from Abū al-Ḥasan ibn Shanabūdh (3), and al-Dāraquṭnī spoke of him unfavourably. He died in Ṣafar of this year; he had been born in 301 AH. (4)

Then came the year 389 AH.

That year Maḥmūd ibn Subuktikīn marched against Khurāsān and wrested its rule from the Samanids. He fought them repeatedly in this year and the years before it, until he erased their very name and trace from the region and their dynasty came to an end at his hands. He then set out to fight Ilik, king of the Turks beyond the River, after the death of the great khan known as Fāʾiq, and a series of arduous battles ensued between them.

In the same year Bahāʾ al-Dawlah gained control of the provinces of Fārs and Khūzistān.

Also that year the Shīʿa wished to mount the decorations they customarily display on the Day of Ghadīr Khumm—the eighteenth of Dhū al-Ḥijjah, as they claim. They were confronted by another group of ignorant folk who affiliate themselves with the Sunnah; these asserted that on this very day the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, and Abū Bakr, may Allah be pleased with him, were confined in the cave, and so they blocked the celebration. This, too, is ignorance, for the cave episode occurred at the beginning of Rabīʿ al-Awwal in the first year of the Hijrah: the two of them remained there for three days; when they emerged they set out for Madīnah and entered it about eight days later. The Prophet’s entrance—peace and blessings be upon him—into Madīnah was on the twelfth of Rabīʿ al-Awwal, a point firmly established and well known.

Because the Shīʿa hold a mourning ceremony on the Day of ʿĀshūrāʾ to show grief for al-Ḥusayn, another faction from among the ignorant of Ahl al-Sunnah retaliated by claiming that on the eighteenth of Muḥarram Muṣʿab ibn al-Zubayr was killed. They held a mourning ceremony for him just as the Shīʿa do for al-Ḥusayn and visited his grave as al-Ḥusayn’s grave is visited. This is simply one innovation answered with another like it; an innovation can only be removed by the sound sunnah. Allah is the granter of success.