He served as the Shaykh of the Ḥarbi Mosque and adhered to the Shafi‘i school. He was killed in Baghdad during al-Basāsirī’s revolt and was buried on Friday, the Day of ‘Arafah of this very year—may Allah have mercy on him.
Dawud, the elder brother of Ṭughril Beg (1), had been residing in Balkh, facing the territories of the sons of Mahmud ibn Subuktikīn. He died this year, and his sons took his place in sovereignty.
Tahir ibn ‘Abd Allah ibn Tahir ibn ‘Umar, Abū al-Ṭayyib al-Ṭabarī (2), the jurist and leading authority of the Shafi‘is, was born in Āmul, Ṭabaristān, in 348 AH. He heard hadith in Jurjān from Abū Ahmad al-Ghitrīfī and in Nīshāpūr from Abū al-Hasan al-Māsarjīsī, under whom he also studied fiqh. He further trained under Abū ‘Alī al-Zajjājī and Abū al-Qāsim ibn Kajj, and later pursued his studies in Baghdad with Shaykh Abū Ḥāmid al-Isfarāʾīnī. He produced commentaries on al-Mukhtaṣar and on the Furūʿ of Ibn al-Ḥaddād, and authored works in uṣūl (legal theory), dialectics, and many other beneficial sciences. In Baghdad he transmitted hadith from al-Dāraqutnī and others. After the death of Abū ‘Abd Allah al-Ṣaymarī he was appointed judge for the Quarter of al-Karkh. Trustworthy and devout, he was thoroughly versed in both the fundamentals and details of the law, and his brilliant writings attest to this. He was of good character, pure of heart, and constant in teaching day and night. I have given his full biography in the Ṭabaqāt (3), which is sufficient.
Shaykh Abū Isḥāq al-Shīrāzī (4)—his disciple, who succeeded him in the teaching circle—recounted that Abū al-Ṭayyib, who was content with little of this world and lived in poverty, once handed one of his slippers to a cobbler so that he might repair it. The cobbler delayed, and whenever Abū al-Ṭayyib passed by he would plunge the slipper into water and say, “O Shaykh, at once, at once—I am fixing it.” The Shaykh replied, “I entrusted it to you to mend it, not to teach it how to swim.”
Ibn Khallikān (5) reported that he and his brother owned only one turban and one shirt between them: when one of them wore the garments the other stayed at home, and when they washed them they both remained indoors until the clothes dried. On this, Qāḍī Abū al-Ṭayyib said: