and mother of kings; among her close, unmarriageable royal kinsmen there were thirty-five kings (1), among them her full brother, the exalted King al-Muʿaẓẓam Turanshah ibn Ayyub (2), lord of Yemen. He is buried beside her in the southernmost of the three graves in her mausoleum, while the middle grave holds her husband and cousin, Nāṣir al-Dīn Muḥammad ibn Asad al-Dīn Shīrkūh ibn Shādhī, lord of Ḥoms (3), whom she married after the father of her son, Ḥusām al-Dīn ʿUmar ibn Lājīn. She herself and her son Ḥusām al-Dīn Muḥammad ibn ʿUmar (4) lie in the third grave, the one adjoining the lecture area. The tomb and the madrasa are therefore called the Ḥusāmiyya (5), after this son of hers, Ḥusām al-Dīn Muḥammad ibn ʿUmar ibn Lājīn, who, in the eyes of his maternal uncle Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn, ranked among the foremost scholars.

Sitt al-Sham—may Allah have mercy on her—was among the most generous of women in almsgiving and kindness to the poor and needy. Every year she would spend thousands of gold dinars in her residence preparing syrups, medicines, compound remedies, and the like, distributing them to the people. She passed away on Friday, late in the day, the sixteenth of Dhū al-Qaʿda of this year, in the house she had converted into a madrasa (6), located near the hospital—namely, the Shāmiyya Jawwāniyya (7). From there her body was carried to her mausoleum in the Shāmiyya Barrāniyya, and her funeral drew vast crowds. May Allah have mercy on her.

– Abū al-Baqāʾ (8), author of “al-Iʿrāb” and “al-Lubāb”: ʿAbd Allah ibn al-Ḥusayn ibn ʿAbd Allah, Shaykh Abū al-Baqāʾ al-ʿUkbarī (9), the blind Hanbalī grammarian. He produced Iʿrāb al-Qurʾān al-ʿAzīz and the book al-Lubāb on grammar; he also wrote marginal notes on the Maqāmāt, on al-Zamakhsharī’s “Mufaṣṣal,” on the Dīwān of al-Mutanabbī, and other works. In addition, he composed treatises on arithmetic and other sciences (10), and he was a righteous man.