In that same year, news reached Baghdad from the pilgrims that fourteen thousand of them had died of thirst, while six thousand survived, and that, in their desperation, they had even drunk camel urine.
In this year as well, Maḥmūd ibn Subuktikīn campaigned against India. The guides led him through unfamiliar territories until they came to a land flooded by the sea, where he himself waded through the water for several days before they emerged. Many of his troops drowned, and he returned to Khurāsān only after extreme hardship. No pilgrimage caravan left Iraq that year, for the Bedouin had rendered the routes unsafe.
Among the notable deaths of the year was that of
Shaykh Abū Ḥāmid al-Isfarāʾīnī (1)
Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad, the leading Shāfiʿī scholar of his time, born in 344 AH. He arrived in Baghdad as a youngster in 363 or 364 AH and studied jurisprudence first with Abū al-Ḥasan ibn al-Marzbān, then with Abū al-Qāsim al-Dārakī. His standing rose steadily until the leadership of the Shāfiʿī school devolved upon him, and he enjoyed great esteem with both the ruler and the populace. Trustworthy, eminent, and learned, he produced a substantial commentary on al-Muzanī spanning some fifty volumes, as well as another set of notes on the principles of jurisprudence. He transmitted ḥadīth from Abū Bakr al-Ismāʿīlī and others.
Al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī (2) said: “I saw him on more than one occasion and attended his lessons in the Mosque of ʿAbd Allāh ibn al-Mubārak in Qaṭīʿat al-Rabīʿ. Al-Azjī and al-Khallāl transmitted to us from him, and I heard it said that some seven hundred jurists or students of jurisprudence would be present at his classes. People used to say, ‘If Imām al-Shāfiʿī were to see him, he would rejoice in him.’”
Abū al-Ḥusayn al-Qudūrī remarked, “I have never seen anyone among the Shāfiʿīs more proficient in jurisprudence than Abū Ḥāmid.”
I have recorded his full biography in Ṭabaqāt al-Shāfiʿiyyah (3).
Ibn Khallikān relates in Wafayāt al-Aʿyān (4) that al-Qudūrī used to say: “He is more learned than al-Shāfiʿī and of sharper legal insight.”