He would likewise frequent the gatherings of pleasure and music—may Allah pardon him. Ibn Khallikān said: “He passed away in the month of Rajab.”

Ibn Khallikān also notes, in this year or the one before it, the death of Abū al-Fath (1) al-Bustī the poet. He is ʿAlī ibn Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥusayn ibn Yūsuf ibn Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Kātib, celebrated for his elegant style and his mastery of tajnīs (paronomasia)—al-Anīs, al-Badīʿ al-Taʾsīs, and al-Ḥadhāqah—and for his artistry in both poetry and prose. We have already mentioned him (2).

Among the aphorisms cited for him by Ibn Khallikān are these:
Whoever sets right his own corruption stifles his envier.
Whoever yields to his anger forfeits his courtesy.
Part of the happiness of your fortune is to stop at your limit.
Death laughs at hope.
A bribe is the rope of necessities.
The boundary of chastity is contentment with sufficiency.

And of his poetry:
If ever he brandishes his pens to set them to work,
he makes you forget every warrior who waves a spear. (3)
And should his fingertips glide across a sheet,
all the secretaries of mankind concede his mastery of script. (4)

He also said—may Allah pardon and forgive him—
If you speak among a people to entertain them
with tales of what is past and what is yet to be,
then never return to a story whose very nature
is charged with rekindling enmities.

Then came the year 402 AH.

In Muḥarram of that year, the vizier Fakhr al-Mulk granted the Rāfiḍah permission to perpetrate the heinous innovation and brazen disgrace (5) of wailing, lamentation, and weeping, of donning coarse hair-shirts (6), of shutting the markets from morning until evening, and of allowing women to wander unveiled and bare-headed, striking their cheeks like the most ignorant folk of pre-Islamic days—all in mourning for al-Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī. May Allah not reward him well for what he did to the Sunnah, and may He blacken his face on the Day of Recompense; surely He is the Hearer of supplication.

In Rabīʿ al-Ākhir, al-Qādir billāh ordered that the Masjid al-Kaff in the Qaṭīʿat al-Daqīq quarter be rebuilt and restored to a state finer than it had ever been. The order was carried out, and the mosque was embellished with exceedingly lavish adornment. Indeed, to Allah we belong and to Him we return.