“O makers of verse, I have offered you sincere counsel—
my only cleverness lies in counseling.
Time has borne away the noble ones;
explaining that would take a long discourse.
Yet you (1) ask for largesse from a man
whose very nature was cast in the mold of stinginess.
And you (2) praise, for beauty and grace,
faces that are the height of ugliness.
Because of that you are denied your provision,
for you lie in your panegyric.
Safeguard your rhymes, for I see no one
in whom hope finds (3) a useful remedy.
If you doubt what I am telling you,
then disprove me by naming even one generous soul.

Hibatu Allah ibn ʿAlī ibn Jaʿfar (4), Abū al-Qāsim ibn Mākūlā, served Jalāl al-Dawlah as vizier on several occasions. He had committed the Qur’an to memory and was well-versed in poetry and historical reports. He was strangled at Hīt in Jumādā II of this year.

Abū Zayd al-Dabūsī (5), ʿAbd Allah ibn ʿUmar ibn ʿĪsā, the Ḥanafī jurist, was—according to Ibn Khallikān (6)—the first to formulate the science of legal disputation (ʿilm al-khilāf) and bring it into being. People used to cite him as a proverb. The nisba al-Dabūsī goes back to a village in the district of Bukhārā. He wrote al-Asrār (“The Secrets”), al-Taqwīm li-l-Adillah (“The Calibration of the Evidences”), and other works and marginalia. It is related that when he debated the jurists, some remained silent; whenever Abū Zayd cornered one of them with a proof, the man would smile or laugh. Abū Zayd thereupon recited:

Why is it that whenever I bind him with an argument
he answers me with laughter and guffaws?
If a man’s laughter counts as insight in law, (7)
then the bear in the wilderness is the keenest jurist!

Al-Ḥawfī, author of Iʿrāb al-Qurʾān, Abū al-Ḥasan ʿAlī ibn Ibrāhīm ibn Saʿīd ibn Yūsuf (8), the grammarian.