And among the eminent people who died that year were:
The shaykh Ibrāhīm al-Dihistānī (1). He had attained great age and longevity, and used to relate that he was forty years old when the Tatars captured Baghdad. He and his companions would attend the Friday prayer beneath the Qubbat al-Nasr until he passed away on the night of Friday, the twenty-seventh of Rabīʿ al-Thānī, in his own zawiyah (2) by the Horse Market in Damascus, where he was also buried. According to his own claim he was one hundred and four years old—Allah knows best.
The shaykh Muḥammad ibn Maḥmūd ibn ʿAlī, called al-Shahḥām, the Qur’an-reciter and disciple of Miʿād Ibn ʿĀmir (3). He was a handsome, dignified elder who persevered in reciting the Qur’an until he died on the very night al-Dihistānī passed away, or one night before him. May Allah have mercy on them both.
The shaykh Shams al-Dīn Ibn al-Ṣāʾigh, the philologist (4)—he is Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad ibn Ḥasan (5) ibn Sibāʿ ibn Abī Bakr al-Judhāmī, originally from Egypt and later settled in Damascus. Born in Egypt around 645 AH, he heard ḥadīth and became an accomplished man of letters, excelling in verse and prose and in the sciences of prosody, rhetorical devices, grammar, and lexicography. He produced an abridgment of al-Jawharī’s Ṣiḥāḥ, a commentary on Ibn Durayd’s Maqṣūrah, and a tāʾiyyah poem of more than two thousand lines in which he treated the sciences and crafts. He was of fine character, pleasant in conversation and company. He lived between Darb al-Ḥabbālīn and al-Farrāsh, near Bustān al-Qiṭ, and died in his home on Monday, the third of Shaʿbān, being buried at Bāb al-Ṣaghīr.
[Then the year 721 AH began.]
It opened with the same governors who had held office the year before. On its very first day the Hammām al-Zayt at the head of Darb al-Ḥajar was reopened; a Samaritan man (6) had rebuilt it after it had lain in ruin since the Khwārazmian era, some eighty years earlier. It is a spacious and well-appointed bathhouse.
On the sixth of Muḥarram a gift from the Tatar ruler Abū Saʿīd reached the sultan, consisting of chests, curios, and slaves (7).