O you who, when the clouds begrudge their rain, your hands shower mankind with pure gold;
You have outshone Khosrow, making even Hātim seem a miser, so the people of every hope come to you in prostration.

Ibn al-Saʿī has preserved many other fine poems of his, may Allah Most High have mercy on him.

Shaykh Abū ʿAmr Ibn al-Ḥājib (1)

He is ʿUthmān ibn ʿUmar ibn Abī Bakr ibn Yūnus al-Duwaynī (2), later known as al-Miṣrī, the distinguished scholar Abū ʿAmr [Ibn al-Ḥājib], the leading authority of the Mālikīs.

His father was a companion of the amir ʿIzz al-Dīn Musak al-Ṣalāḥī, while he himself devoted his life to learning: he studied the variant Qurʾanic readings, mastered grammar with extraordinary precision, applied himself to jurisprudence, and surpassed the scholars of his time (3). He then became pre-eminent in many branches of knowledge—legal theory and its subsidiary rulings, the Arabic language, grammar, morphology, prosody, Qurʾanic exegesis, and more.

Moreover, (4) he settled in Damascus in 617 AH, teaching the Mālikī school in the congregational mosque until he departed in the company (5) of Shaykh ʿIzz al-Dīn ibn ʿAbd al-Salām (6) in 638 AH. The two travelled on to Egypt, where Shaykh Abū ʿAmr died that same year in Alexandria and was buried in the cemetery situated between the Lighthouse and the city proper.

Shaykh Shihāb al-Dīn Abū Shāma (7) said: “He was one of the keenest minds (8) of this ummah—reliable, authoritative, humble, chaste, exceedingly modest, fair-minded, a lover of knowledge and its people, a disseminator of it, patient in the face of harm and steadfast under trial. He visited Damascus several times, the last in the year seventeen, and remained there teaching the Mālikī school and serving as a shaykh to those who benefited from him in the sciences of the Qurʾanic readings and Arabic (9). He was a pillar of the religion in both knowledge and practice, remarkable in every field of learning."