Then Sultan al-Ṣāliḥ Ayyūb returned to Egypt borne in a litter, sick and grievously wasted. Yet neither his illness nor the hardship he was enduring (1) distracted him from ordering the killing of his brother al-ʿĀdil Abū Bakr ibn al-Kāmil, who had been master of the Egyptian realms after their father. He had already imprisoned him from the very year he seized Egypt; and now, in Shawwāl of this same year, he commanded that he be strangled. He was accordingly strangled [and buried] in the mausoleum of Shams al-Dawla. Thereafter al-Ṣāliḥ survived only until the middle of Shaʿbān of the following year, in the worst condition and severest sickness. Exalted is He to whom belong creation and command.
In that year the Chief Judge of Egypt also died: Afḍal (2) al-Dīn (3) al-Khūnajī (4), a philosopher and consummate logician who, together with this expertise, displayed praiseworthy conduct in his legal rulings. Abū Shāmah (5) records that many spoke well of him.
Among those who died the same year was ʿAlī ibn Yaḥyā (6) Jamāl (7) al-Dīn Abū l-Ḥasan [al-Baghdādī] al-Mukharramī (8). He was a young, accomplished, and cultured poet who composed a concise, comprehensive work embracing many disciplines on self-discipline, intellect, and the condemnation of passion, which he entitled “The Results of Reflections.”
In it he wrote the following wisdom-laden maxim:
“The sultan is an imām to be followed and the religion he upholds is divinely ordained. If he is unjust, the judges will incline to injustice through him; but if he is just, no one will transgress in (9)