December. Al-Basāsirī, too, was killed on Tuesday, the eighteenth of December—exactly one solar year later; the slaying actually took place in Dhu al-Ḥijjah of this same year.
al-Ḥasan ibn Abī al-Faḍl (1) Abū ʿAlī al-Sharmaqānī, the schoolmaster, Qur’an reciter, and ḥāfiẓ, well-versed in the variant readings.
He lived in straitened circumstances. One day his teacher Ibn al-ʿAllāf saw him scooping lettuce leaves from the Tigris to eat. Ibn al-ʿAllāf informed Ibn al-Muslima of his plight, whereupon Ibn al-Muslima ordered a servant to fit the storeroom in his mosque with a new key and to deposit there each day three ratls of semolina bread, a chicken, and a portion of sugared sweetmeat. Al-Sharmaqānī assumed this was a divine favor and that the food he found in the storeroom came from Paradise, so he kept the matter to himself for some time and frequently recited:
Whoever is shown a secret and then betrays it,
Shall never be trusted with confidences as long as he lives;
[They will cast him off, denying him their nearness,
And what was once intimate will become estrangement.]
On one occasion Ibn al-ʿAllāf broached the subject and said, among other things, “I see that you have grown stout—how can that be when you are a poor man?” Al-Sharmaqānī responded with hints and allusions, but when pressed he confessed that he found in his storeroom each day food from Paradise sufficient for his needs, considering it a mark of divine grace. Ibn al-ʿAllāf replied, “Pray for Ibn al-Muslima, for he is the one doing this for you,” and he explained the whole arrangement. Al-Sharmaqānī felt crestfallen and took no pleasure in the disclosure.
ʿAlī ibn Maḥmūd ibn Ibrāhīm (2) ibn Māḥurra (3) Abū al-Ḥasan al-Rawzanī,
shaykh of the Ṣūfīs, to whom the Rawzanī hospice is attributed; it had originally been built for his own teacher, Abū al-Ḥasan al-Ḥuṣrī. He kept company with Abū ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Sulamī and said, “I sat with a thousand shaykhs, and from each shaykh I preserve one anecdote.” He died in Ramaḍān at the age of eighty-five.
Muḥammad ibn ʿAlī ibn al-Fath ibn Muḥammad ibn ʿAlī (4) Abū Ṭālib al-Ḥarbī, known as al-ʿUshārī; he was so called on account of the great longevity of his grandfather (5).