the gazing at the amrad (beardless youth). He inclined to the libertine school (1).

He then cited some of Muḥammad ibn Ṭāhir’s own verses:

[Basit meter]
Spurn tasawwuf and that vaunted zuhd (asceticism)
With which the limbs of certain folk are busied;
And pass by the monastery of Dārata, for therein
You will find monks—priests and deacons alike.
Drink well-aged wine from the hand of a pagan girl:
She serves you twin draughts—her glance and the cup.
Then listen to the twang of lutes from a fawn-like youth,
Slender, whose eye is keener than diamond.
He sings the poetry of a widely famed poet,
Verses they have copied at the head of their scrolls—
“If a breeze from you had not come to refresh me,
I would have been burned up (3) by the heat of my sighs.”

Al-Samʿānī then remarked, “Perhaps he repented of all of this.”

Ibn al-Jawzī replied, “It is not acceptable to record the criticism of the imams against him and then excuse it with the mere possibility of his repentance (4).”

Ibn al-Jawzī also related that, when he was in the throes of death, he kept repeating this couplet and saying (5):

[Mutaqārib meter]
“You were never ones to know harshness;
From whom, then, have you learned it?”

He passed away on the western side of Baghdad in Rabīʿ al-Awwal (6) of this same year.

Abū Bakr al-Shāshī (7), author of the Mustazharī—Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad ibn al-Ḥusayn ibn ʿUmar, Abū Bakr (8) al-Shāshī—was one of the foremost Shāfiʿī imams of his time. He was born in Muḥarram 427 AH. He heard hadith from Abū Yaʿlā ibn al-Farrāʾ, Abū Bakr al-Khaṭīb, and Shaykh Abū Isḥāq al-Shīrāzī, and studied fiqh under the latter and others. He read “al-Shāmil” with its author Ibn al-Ṣabbāgh (9), and produced an abridgement of it in the work he assembled for al-Mustazhir bi-Allāh, entitling it “Ḥilyah…"