Then the year 459 AH began, and in it:

Abū Saʿd al-Mustawfī, titled Sharaf al-Mulk, built in Baghdad the shrine of Imām Abū Ḥanīfa al-Nuʿmān, raised a dome over it, and beside it constructed a madrasah, installing teachers and jurists there. Abū Jaʿfar ibn al-Bayāḍī entered the shrine as a visitor to Abū Ḥanīfa and, extemporizing, recited:

Have you not seen how knowledge lay neglected,
until this one, hidden in the grave, gathered it anew?
And just as this land had once been lifeless,
the bounty of the chief, Abū Saʿd, revived it.

In Shaʿbān a scorching wind blew, causing the death of many people and animals in Baghdad and destroying the city’s lemon and citron trees.

That same year the grave-shrine of Maʿrūf al-Karkhī burned down. The cause was that the caretaker, being ill, had set barley-water to boil; the fire spread to the wooden fittings and the entire precinct was consumed.

Famine and great mortality also struck Damascus, Aleppo, Ḥarrān, and all the districts of Khurasan. A plague swept the livestock, their heads and eyes swelling so badly that people could seize wild asses with their bare hands—yet they disdained eating them.

Ibn al-Jawzī relates in al-Muntaẓam (1): On Saturday, the tenth of Dhū al-Qaʿdah, the ʿAmīd, Judge Abū Saʿd (2), gathered the people for the inaugural lesson at the Niẓāmiyyah in Baghdad and appointed Shaykh Abū Isḥāq al-Shīrāzī to teach and serve as its head shaykh. When the crowd had fully assembled and Abū Isḥāq was on his way to lecture, a young jurist met him and said, “Master, you are about to teach on usurped land.” Abū Isḥāq therefore refused to proceed (3) and returned home. Shaykh Abū Naṣr ibn al-Ṣabbāgh was installed in his place and taught. When Niẓām al-Mulk heard of this he became angry with the ʿAmīd, summoned Shaykh Abū Isḥāq, and restored him to the Niẓāmiyyah in Dhū al-Ḥijjah of the same year. Even so, the shaykh would not perform any obligatory prayer inside the college; instead he would go out to a nearby mosque to pray, maintaining that part of its land was usurped. Ibn al-Ṣabbāgh’s tenure lasted twenty days, after which Shaykh Abū Isḥāq returned.

In Dhū al-Qaʿdah of this year al-Ṣulayḥī, ruler of Yemen and lord of Mecca, was killed by one of the Yemeni amirs; the khuṭbah in Mecca was then delivered in the name of the ʿAbbāsid caliph al-Qāʾim bi-Amr Allāh (4). That year the pilgrimage was led by Abū al-Ghanāʾim the naqīb.