That year Baghdad was struck by a violent hailstorm, the sky densely overcast and the winds fierce, so that a large number of its date-palms were destroyed; their yield did not return to normal until several years later (1).

During the same year the two noble ʿAlids, al-Sharīf al-Raḍī and al-Sharīf al-Murtaḍā, set out with the Iraqi pilgrimage caravan. The Bedouin chieftain Ibn al-Jarrāḥ intercepted them and held them captive, and they ransomed themselves from him with nine thousand dinars of their own wealth before he released them.

Among the distinguished figures who died this year:

Zāhir ibn Aḥmad (2) ibn Muḥammad ibn ʿĪsā al-Sarkhasī, the Qurʾān-reciter (3), jurist, and ḥadīth scholar, the leading shaykh of his age in Khurāsān. He had studied recitation under Ibn Mujāhid, jurisprudence with Abū Isḥāq al-Marwazī—the imām of the Shāfiʿīs—and language, literature, and grammar with Abū Bakr ibn al-Anbārī. He died in Rabīʿ al-Ākhir at the age of ninety-six.

ʿUbayd Allah (4) ibn Muḥammad ibn Isḥāq (5) ibn Sulaymān ibn Makhlad ibn Ibrāhīm ibn Marwān (6), Abū al-Qāsim, better known as Ibn Ḥabābah. He narrated ḥadīth from Abū al-Qāsim al-Baghawī, Abū Bakr ibn Abī Dāwūd, and their contemporaries, and was deemed trustworthy, reliable, and possessed of sound chains of transmission. Born in Baghdad in 299 AH, he died in Jumādā al-Ūlā (7) of this year at the age of ninety. Shaykh (8) Abū Ḥāmid al-Isfarāyīnī, the foremost Shāfiʿī scholar, led his funeral prayer, and he was buried in the cemetery adjoining the Manṣūr Mosque. May Allah have mercy on him.