He came from a household of hadith experts and imams (1). Ibn al-Jawzi (2) related on the authority of his teacher ʿAbd al-Wahhāb that doubts had been raised about him. He died suddenly in Shawwāl of this year and was buried beside Ibn Surayj (3).
Faṭima (4) bint al-Ḥasan ibn al-Ḥasan ibn Faḍlawayh (5): she transmitted hadith from al-Khaṭīb, Ibn al-Muslima, and others. A gifted preacher, she maintained a ribāṭ (retreat) in which ascetic women gathered. Ibn al-Jawzi (6) received from her transmission of the Musnad of al-Shāfiʿī and other works.
Abū Muḥammad ʿAbd Allāh ibn Muḥammad ibn al-Sayyid al-Baṭalyawsī (7), later known as al-Balansī (8), authored numerous books on philology and other subjects. He compiled al-Muthallath in two volumes, adding much to the material of Qutrub. He produced a commentary on Abū al-ʿAlāʾ’s Saqṭ al-Zand that surpasses the author’s own, and another on Ibn Qutaybah’s Adab al-Kātib. Among his verses cited by Qāḍī Ibn Khallikān (9) are:
The man of knowledge lives on, enduring after death,
though his limbs lie mouldering beneath the soil;
While the ignorant is dead, though walking upon the earth—
men deem him living, yet he is naught.
[Then the year 522 AH commenced.]
At its outset an envoy from Sanjar (10) came to the caliph requesting that Sanjar’s name be mentioned in the Friday sermons from the pulpits of Baghdad (11), so that it would be proclaimed for him each Friday in the congregational mosque (12).