it ripens, for you will receive it at its appointed time (1), [and do not be hasty in seeking your needs, lest they weigh upon you and despair overtake you] (2).

Ibn al-Najjār (3), the ḥāfiẓ and author of “al-Tārīkh,” is Muḥammad ibn Maḥmūd ibn al-Ḥasan ibn Hibat Allah ibn Maḥāsin Ibn al-Najjār, Abū ʿAbd Allah al-Baghdādī, the eminent hadith master. He listened to an immense body of reports and travelled both east and west. Born in 578 AH (4), he began compiling his Chronicle when he was fifteen years old. He studied [grammar and belles-lettres], the Qurʾanic readings, and read extensively to the shaykhs until he had collected transmissions from some three thousand teachers, roughly four hundred of whom were women. He stayed abroad for twenty-eight years and then (5) returned to Baghdad bearing a trove of works, among them: “al-Qamar al-Munīr fī al-Musnad al-Kabīr,” in which he records what every Companion narrated; “Kanz al-Ayyām fī Maʿrifat al-Sunan wa-al-Aḥkām”; “al-Mukhtalif wa-al-Muʾtalif”; “al-Sābiq wa-al-Lāḥiq”; “al-Muttafiq wa-al-Muftariq”; “Kitāb al-Alqāb”; “Nahj al-Iṣāba fī Maʿrifat al-Ṣaḥāba”; and “al-Kamāl (6) fī Asmāʾ al-Rijāl,” along with many others, most of which he did not finish. He also composed “Kitāb al-Dhayl ʿalā Tārīkh Madīnat al-Salām” in sixteen complete volumes (7); “Akhbār Makkah wa-al-Madīnah wa-Bayt al-Maqdis”; “Ghurar al-Fawāʾid” in five volumes; and a great many other pieces that Ibn al-Sāʿī enumerated in his biography.

When he returned to Baghdad, accommodation was offered to him in the madrasahs, but he declined, saying (8), “I have with me what spares me [from that]” (9). He purchased a slave-girl and fathered a child by her (10), living for a time on his own savings; later he found himself in need, so he took residence as a muhaddith among the hadith-scholars in the Mustanṣiriyyah school when