Shaykh Abū Isḥāq (1) replied, “That is not to be conceded, for Abū Ḥāmid and his peers, when set beside Imām al-Shāfiʿī, are as the poet says:
They halted in Mecca amid the clans of Nawfal,
while I encamped in the bare desert, the farthest station. (2)
Ibn Khallikān (3) adds that among his writings are the ‘Great Commentary’ (al-Taʿlīqa al-Kubrā) and a small treatise called ‘The Orchard’ (al-Bustān), which contains many curiosities.
He continues: “During one debate a jurist offered him an apology, whereupon the Shaykh [Abū Ḥāmid] improvised:
A public offence burst forth before all and spread abroad,
while a whispered excuse came later, confirming what had gone before.
Whoever thinks a hidden plea can blot out manifest affront
has fallen into the gravest error.”
He passed away on the night of Saturday, eleven nights remaining of Shawwāl in this same year. After the funeral prayer was performed for him in the open ground, he was buried in his house; the crowd was vast and the weeping profuse. In 410 AH his body was transferred to the Bāb Ḥarb cemetery.
Ibn al-Jawzī records that he lived sixty-one years and some months. May Allah have mercy on him.
ʿUbayd Allāh ibn Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad ibn ʿAlī ibn Mihrān (4), Abū Aḥmad ibn Abī Muslim, the expert in the laws of inheritance and Qurʾan reciter, heard ḥadīth from al-Maḥāmilī and Yūsuf ibn Yaʿqūb, and attended the sessions of Abū Bakr ibn al-Anbārī. He was an upright, trustworthy imam—devout, dignified, and very charitable. He would recite the Qurʾan profusely and then listen to ḥadīth. Highly esteemed, whenever he visited Abū Ḥāmid al-Isfarāʾīnī, the latter would rise barefoot and escort him to the mosque door. [He died] after surpassing the age of eighty.
Al-Sharīf al-Raḍī (5), Muḥammad ibn [al-Ṭāhir Abū Aḥmad] al-Ḥusayn ibn Mūsā ibn Muḥammad ibn Mūsā ibn Ibrāhīm ibn Mūsā ibn Jaʿfar ibn Muḥammad ibn ʿAlī ibn al-Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib, Abū al-Ḥasan al-ʿAlawī, was granted by Bahāʾ al-Dawlah the honorific Raḍī Dhū al-Ḥasabayn, while his brother was styled Murtadā Dhū al-Majdayn. After his father’s death he became naqīb of the Prophet’s descendants in Baghdad. A man of virtue and piety, he learned to recite the Qurʾan after the age of thirty and memorized a good portion of fiqh and other branches of knowledge, and he was