to the Sufi Cemetery, where he was laid to rest beside his brother Sharaf al-Din ʿAbd Allah—may Allah have mercy on them both. The burial took place only a short while before the ʿAsr prayer, so vast were the crowds who kept arriving to perform the funeral prayer over him—people from the orchards, the Ghūṭa, the surrounding villages, and elsewhere. The shops were closed, and no one stayed away except those truly unable to come; each one invoked mercy for him and prayed for him, affirming that had he been able he would certainly have attended. A great many women were present, their number estimated at fifteen thousand, not counting those on the rooftops and others besides; all, it was said, prayed for him and wept. As for the men, they were reckoned at sixty thousand, one hundred thousand, even two hundred thousand and more. Some people drank the water left over from his washing; others divided among themselves the remaining sidr leaves with which he had been washed; and one hundred and fifty dirhams were paid for the thread that had held the mercury he wore round his neck to combat lice.

It was also reported that the skull-cap that had been on his head fetched five hundred dirhams. The funeral was marked by loud lamentation, abundant weeping, and earnest supplication; many complete recitations of the Quran were dedicated to him in al-Ṣāliḥiyya and throughout the city. For many days people came and went to his grave, night and day, spending the night there and greeting the morning beside it. Numerous righteous dreams concerning him were seen, and many poets composed lengthy elegies mourning him.

He was born in Ḥarrān on Monday, 10 Rabīʿ al-Awwal 661 AH. While still a child he came with his father and family to Damascus, where he heard hadith from Ibn ʿAbd al-Dāʾim, Ibn Abī al-Yusr, Ibn ʿAbdān, Shaykh Shams al-Din al-Ḥanbalī, Shaykh Shams al-Din ibn ʿAṭāʾ al-Ḥanafī, Shaykh Jamāl al-Din ibn al-Ṣayrafī, Majd al-Din Ibn ʿAsākir, Shaykh Jamāl al-Din al-Baghdādī, al-Najīb ibn al-Miqdād, Ibn Abī al-Khair, Ibn ʿAllān, Ibn Abī Bakr al-Harawī (1), al-Kamāl ʿAbd al-Raḥīm, al-Fakhr ʿAlī, Ibn Shaybān, al-Sharaf ibn al-Qawwās, Zaynab bint Makkī, and many others from whom he heard hadith. He read extensively on his own, pursued hadith, compiled ṭibāq and athbāt, and personally persisted in attending audition sessions for many years; he rarely heard anything without memorizing it. Thereafter he applied himself to the sciences. Exceptionally intelligent and endowed with prodigious memory, he became an imam in Qurʾanic exegesis and its related disciplines, fully versed in jurisprudence—[it is said that he knew the jurisprudence of the legal schools better than their own adherents, whether of his time or others] (2). He was an authority on points of disagreement among the scholars, learned in both uṣūl and furūʿ, grammar, lexicology, and other transmitted and rational sciences. No gathering was convened and no scholar conversed with him in any field without imagining that that field was his specialty, finding him masterfully versed in it.

As for hadith, he was its [standard-bearer] (2), preserving its texts and chains (3), distinguishing the sound from the weak, and possessing deep knowledge of its transmitters. He produced numerous writings and valuable notes in uṣūl and furūʿ: a number were completed, fair-copied, written down from him, and read back to him—some in full and others in part; a large set he left unfinished; and another set he completed but, to this day, has not yet been rendered into a clean copy.