He has surely been deluded who sets a banded agate beside a pearl,
and who measures a qahba (harlot) against a comely, free-born woman.
I am a minstrel, my brother an austere ascetic;
in the same house there are two wells—one sweet, the other bitter. (1)

On another occasion the discussion turned to the slaying of ʿUthmān while ʿAlī was present in Madinah (2).
So he broke into one of his “kān-wa-kān” chants:

If a man in whose very neighborhood one like Ibn ʿAffān is killed can plead innocence,
then he must, in Syria, accept the plea of Yazīd.

The Rāfiḍah then resolved to kill him. Yet it happened that on one of the Ramadan nights, while he was going about rousing people for their pre-dawn meal, he passed the caliph’s residence. The caliph sneezed from the balcony (3), and Abū Manṣūr, still in the street, blessed him. The caliph thereupon sent him one hundred dinars and issued an order guaranteeing his protection from the Rāfiḍah until he died in this year—may Allah pardon him (4).

[Abū Ṭāhir al-Khushūʿī] (5)

In the same year the senior ḥadīth authority of al-Shām, Abū Ṭāhir Barakāt ibn Ibrāhīm ibn Ṭāhir al-Khushūʿī, passed away. He shared many teachers with Ibn ʿAsākir (6), and he outlived him by twenty-seven years, thus linking grandchildren to grandfathers.

[Then the year 598 AH began]

In it Shaykh Abū ʿUmar Muḥammad ibn [Aḥmad ibn] (7) Qudāmah (8) al-Maqdisī—the builder of the school at the foot of Mount Qāsiyūn (9)—began construction of the congregational mosque (10) on the mountain (11). The expenses were met by a man named Shaykh Abū Dāwūd Maḥāsin (12).