Ibn Khallikān states (1): He died (2) on the night of Sunday, the twenty-ninth of Rajab of this year.

Ibn Sukaynah (3)—ʿAbd al-Wahhāb ibn ʿAlī Ḍiyāʾ al-Dīn, Abū Aḥmad (4), popularly known as Ibn Sukaynah the Sufi—was counted among the abdāl (saintly “substitutes”). He heard a vast amount of ḥadīth (5) and conveyed it in many lands. He was born (6) in 519 AH. He was a companion of Shaykh Abū al-Faraj Ibn al-Jawzī (8), constantly attending his gatherings, and the day of his funeral was notable for the great multitude (9) of both elite and common people who turned out. May Allah have mercy on him.

Muẓaffar ibn Shāshir (10), the Baghdadi Sufi preacher, was born in 523 AH. He studied ḥadīth and used to exhort the people in the Aʿziyyah quarter, in mosques, and in surrounding villages. A man of natural wit, he was once approached while he was preaching by someone who said to him privately, “I am ill and hungry.” He replied, “Praise your Lord—you have been granted well-being.”

On another occasion he passed by a butcher selling scrawny meat and calling out, “Where is the fellow who swore he would never be cheated?” Ibn Shāshir retorted, “Until you make him break his oath!”

He related: “I once held a session in Baʿqūbā (11). One person said, ‘I have a naṣfiyya for the shaykh,’ another said the same, and yet another followed suit, until they had counted about fifty naṣfiyyas (12). I thought to myself, ‘Tonight I am set; I shall return to the city a merchant!’ But when morning came, there was only a pile of barley in the mosque. I was told, ‘These are the naṣfiyyas (13) the people mentioned’—a small measure they call a naṣfiyya, about the size of a bowl.

“I once held a session in Bājisrā (14). They collected something for me, though I did not know what it was. When morning came, it turned out to be nothing but a bundle of wool.”