as al-Bālfālī (1), the author of al-Amālī (2)—and Bālafāla is a village near Āyadhaj (3). He stayed for a time in Basra, where he heard hadith from Abū ʿUmar (4) ibn ʿAbd al-Wāḥid al-Hāshimī and others, after which he came to Baghdad and settled there. He was personally trustworthy, possessed of many virtues, and the following are among his fine (5) verses:

When beauty showed itself in faces grown base—
faces unlike those I once knew among its scholars—
and I saw it ringed about by others than the men
who had been the guardians of its halls and forecourts,
I recited an ancient, widely quoted line
while my eyes brimmed over with their flowing tears:
“Though the tents remain the very tents they pitched,
I see the women of the tribe are not the women I knew.”

He also said:

Each witless madman now sits to teach,
a dullard styling himself jurist and professor;
so let the people of learning recall a time-honored verse
that is heard in every gathering:
“It has grown so lean that even its kidneys show,
and every penniless wretch now haggles over it.”

Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wāḥid, Ibn al-Ṣabbāgh, the Shāfiʿī jurist—this is not the later scholar who wrote al-Shāmil (7). Rather, he was a student of Shaykh Abū Ḥāmid al-Isfarāyinī. He held a fatwa circle in the great mosque, testified before the chief judge Ibn al-Dāmghānī the Ḥanafī, who accepted his testimony, and he heard hadith from Ibn Shāhīn and others. He was reliable and held in great esteem. May Allah Most High have mercy on him.

Hilāl ibn al-Muḥsin ibn Ibrāhīm ibn Hilāl (8), Abūʾl-Ḥusayn (9) the Ṣābian scribe, was the author of a history. His grandfather was Abū Isḥāq the Ṣābian, noted for his epistles, and his father too had been a Ṣābian. Hilāl himself embraced Islam and his Islam was sound, and he had