I say (1): I have examined this book and copied from it a number of fine and beneficial passages.

Ibn Khallikān (2) said: He was born in 544 AH, although some report [546 or 549 AH] (3). He died in this very year. His brother, Abū ʿAmr ʿUthmān, afterwards took charge of the Kāmilīyah Dār al-Ḥadith in Egypt and died one year later.

I also say: People spoke of him in many ways, and some even accused him of fabricating a hadith that permits shortening the Maghrib prayer. I had hoped to see its chain of transmission so that we might assess its narrators (4). The scholars—­as Ibn al-Mundhir and others have recorded—­are unanimously agreed that Maghrib is not to be shortened (5). May Allah, exalted is He, pardon both us and him by His grace and generosity.

(6) [I likewise came across a small fascicle compiled by the precise and beneficial hadith scholar Abū Ṣādiq Muḥammad, son of the ḥāfiẓ Abū al-Ḥusayn Yaḥyā ibn ʿAlī ibn ʿAbd Allāh al-Qurashī al-ʿAṭṭārī (7), on the biography of his teacher Abū al-Khaṭṭāb Ibn Dihyah. In it he assembled people’s statements vilifying the man, and discussed his upbringing, background, studies, and scholarly pursuits. Some claimed that he obtained a judgeship on that account—­Allah knows best. Others rejected his claim to descend from Dihyah al-Kalbī, asserting that Dihyah’s line became extinct after the third century AH. He also cited, from Ibn ʿUnayn (8), the two famous lines (9) composed in the sarīʿ metre:

“Dihyah left no offspring; yet how freely you fabricate (10)
slander and sheer falsehoods in his name.
Nothing has been accepted among the people as true
except that you are, without doubt, of the Kalb tribe.”

Among the most repugnant things I found in that fascicle is what he related from his shaykh, the ḥāfiẓ Ibn al-Najjār (11), from the ḥāfiẓ ʿAlī ibn—