and the amirs would likewise make the journey to Minin. (1) Shaykh Burhān al-Dīn al-Fazārī said: “I visited him, my father accompanying me, and my father used to sit in his presence.” (2) The shaykh would speak at great length in words so unusual that none of those present could understand him.
Shaykh Tāj al-Dīn related that he heard him say: “No one draws near to Allah with anything equal to humility and earnest entreaty before Him.”
He also heard him say: “The bewildered ecstatic (al-muwallah) is barred from the path of Allah; he imagines that he has arrived, but if he knew he was barred he would desist from what he is doing, for the path of the people of spiritual travel is trodden only by those of sound and steady intellect.”
He would further say: “Samāʿ (listening to devotional singing) is the occupation of the idlers.”
Shaykh Tāj al-Dīn said: “Shaykh Jund was one of the folk of the Path and among the scholars of spiritual realization. He told me in 661 AH that he had reached the age of ninety-five.”
I say: On that basis he must have exceeded one hundred, for he died in Ramadan of this very year and was buried in his well-known zawiyah in the village of Minin (3). People came from Damascus and its environs for many days to pray at his grave—may Allah have mercy on him.
Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān (4) ibn Muḥammad (5), the ḥāfiẓ Badr al-Dīn Abū ʿAbd Allāh ibn al-Fuwayrah (6) al-Sulamī al-Ḥanafī.
He studied under al-Ṣadr Sulaymān and Ibn ʿAṭāʾ, and in grammar under Ibn Mālik. He achieved mastery, excelled, composed both verse and prose, taught in the Shubliyya and Qasāʿīn madrasahs, was offered the deputy judgeship but declined it, and perfected the calligraphic style known as al-kitābah al-mansūbah.
One of his companions saw him in a dream after his death and asked, “What has Allah done with you?” He thereupon recited:
[in the sarīʿ metre]
I had no intercessor in His sight … save my conviction that He is One.
He passed away in Jumādā al-Ākhirah and was buried on the outskirts of Damascus—may Allah have mercy on him.
Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb ibn Manṣūr (7), Shams al-Dīn Abū ʿAbd Allāh al-Ḥarrānī al-Ḥanbalī, a disciple of Shaykh Majd al-Dīn Ibn Taymiyyah.