and public speaking; yet he was not, as some of his companions who envied him and maligned him alleged, anything of the sort.
He lectured in a number of madrasas in Egypt and Syria, and in Damascus he taught at the two Shāmiyyas, the ʿAdhraʾiyya, and the Ashrafiyya Dār al-Hadīth. He was once entrusted with the Friday pulpit (1) for only a few days, as noted above, but the populace rose against him, removed the appointment from his hands, and he never ascended its pulpit.
He then associated closely with the Sultan’s deputy al-Afram, and incidents occurred that cannot be recorded here and ought not to be counted [among the shameful deeds] (2). Matters reached the point that he resolved to move from Damascus to Aleppo after winning the affection of its deputy governor; there he stayed and taught. Later he traveled back and forth as an envoy between the Sultan and Mahannā, in the company of Arghūn and Altanbughā. Eventually he settled in Egypt, where he taught at the Shrine of al-Ḥusayn until he died there on the morning of Wednesday, the twenty-fourth of Dhu al-Ḥijjah, in his house near the Ḥākim Mosque. He was buried that same day, near Shaykh Muḥammad ibn Abī Ḥamzah, in the cemetery of the qadi who supervised the army in the Qarāfa.
When news of his death reached Damascus, the absentee funeral prayer was offered for him in its Great Mosque after the Friday prayer on the third of Muḥarram of the following year. Many composed elegies for him, among them Ibn Ghānim ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn, al-Qaḥfāzī (3), and al-Ṣafadī, for they had been among his intimate friends.
[On the Day of ʿArafah there also died] Shaykh ʿImād al-Dīn Ismāʿīl al-Fawghī (4), the agent of Qajlīs. He had built for him the bastion (bāshūra) at Bāb al-Ṣaghīr in the western outer quarter. Energetic and capable, he nevertheless came from a Shiʿite family. The Sultan’s deputy once summoned him and beat him in his presence; indeed, the deputy himself rose and struck his face with spurs. He was carried away in a mortal state and died on the Day of ʿArafah. He was buried the same day at the foot of Mount Qāsiyūn, and he had a house outside Bāb al-Farādis.
[Then the year 717 AH began.] It opened while the officials (5) were the same as in the preceding year.
In Ṣafar construction commenced on the mosque founded by the lord of the emirs, Tankiz, the governor of Syria, outside Bāb al-Naṣr, opposite Ḥikr al-Summāq, on the Banias River in Damascus. Judges and scholars deliberated at length over the determination of its qiblah, and the matter was finally settled in accordance with the view of Shaykh Taqī al-Dīn Ibn Taymiyyah on Sunday, the twenty-fifth of that month. By order of the Sultan, and with his support for his deputy, construction was set in motion (6).