He followed the Hanafi madhhab (legal school); he loved scholars and the poor, honoring, respecting, and benefitting them. In his judgments he practiced admirable equity and unwavering adherence to the purified Sacred Law. He convened sessions of justice, presided over them personally, and they were attended by the chief judge, jurists, and muftis (1) of every school. Each Tuesday he would sit in the Suspended Mosque at the kiosk (2) so that anyone (3)—Muslims and dhimmīs alike, even their womenfolk (4)—could have access to him.

He enclosed the Jews’ quarter with a wall, for it had been in ruins. He closed Bāb Kīsān (5) and opened Bāb al-Faraj, where previously no gate had existed at all.

Throughout his lands he made the sunnah manifest and suppressed innovation. He ordered that the adhān in Aleppo (6) include the phrases “ḥayya ʿala al-ṣalāh, ḥayya ʿala al-falāḥ.” Formerly (7), in the days of his father and grandfather, the call had said “ḥayya ʿalā khayr al-ʿamal,” because the insignia of the Rāfiḍīs (8) had been openly displayed there.

He enforced the ḥudūd (legal penalties), captured fortresses, defeated the Franks more than once (9), and wrested from their hands many of the formidable strongholds they had seized from Muslim (10) territories, as was detailed earlier in the preceding years [of his reign] (11).

He assigned stipends (12) to the Arab chieftains so that they would not molest the pilgrims.

In Damascus he built a magnificent bīmāristān (hospital) such that nothing like it had been erected in all of Syria before him—nor has its equal been built since (13). He endowed a waqf for those who teach orphans penmanship and reading, granting them stipends and clothing; for those who teach orphans the Quran; and for those residing near the Two Sanctuaries. [He also had perpetual endowments for every avenue of goodness, and for widows and the needy] (14).