Qāḍī Abū al-Walīd al-Bājī (1) — Sulaymān ibn Khalaf ibn Saʿd ibn Ayyūb al-Tujībī, the Andalusian from Badajoz, a Mālikī jurist—was counted among the leading ḥuffāẓ who were prolific in both law and ḥadith. He began by studying ḥadith at home, then set out for the eastern lands in 426 AH, where he heard a great deal and met the luminaries of the age, including Qāḍī Abū al-Ṭayyib al-Ṭabarī and Shaykh Abū Isḥāq al-Shīrāzī. He remained in Mecca for three years with Shaykh Abū Dharr al-Harawī, spent another three years in Baghdad, and a year in Mosul with its judge Abū Jaʿfar al-Simnānī, studying jurisprudence and legal theory under him. He received transmission from al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī, and al-Khaṭīb in turn narrated from him.
Al-Khaṭīb related the following fine couplets from him:
If I know with unwavering certainty
that the whole of my life is no more than an hour, (2)
why, then, do I not guard that hour jealously (3)
and devote it to righteousness and obedience?
After thirteen years abroad he returned to his homeland and assumed the judiciary there. It is also said—according to Ibn Khallikān—that he served as judge of Aleppo. Ibn Khallikān adds that al-Bājī authored many works, among them:
• al-Muntaqā, a commentary on the Muwaṭṭaʾ;
• Iḥkām al-Fuṣūl fī Aḥkām al-Uṣūl;
• al-Jarḥ wa-l-Taʿdīl; and others.
He was born in 403 AH and died in Almería (4) on the night of Thursday, between the two evening prayers, the twenty-ninth of Rajab of this year.
Abū al-Agharr Dubays ibn ʿAlī ibn Mazīd (5), surnamed Nūr al-Dawla, also passed away this year at the age of eighty, after ruling a little more than sixty of those years. Power then passed to his son Abū Kāmil, who received the honorific Bahāʾ al-Dawla.
ʿAbd Allāh ibn Aḥmad ibn Riḍwān (6), Abū al-Qāsim al-Baghdādī, a man of high standing, suffered from debilitating migraine for three years, during which he remained in a darkened room, seeing no light and hearing no sound.