Among the distinguished figures who died this year were the following:
• In Muḥarram passed away the scholar and Chief Judge Fakhr al-Dīn ʿUthmān (1) ibn al-Zayn ʿAlī ibn ʿUthmān al-Ḥalabī, the son of the preacher of Jabrīn (2), a Shāfiʿī. He held the judgeship of Aleppo and was an imām. He authored a Commentary on the Mukhtaṣar of Ibn al-Ḥājib in jurisprudence and a commentary on al-Badīʿ by Ibn al-Sāʿātī. His fawāʾid were plentiful and his writings of great worth. He assumed the post in Aleppo after Shaykh Ibn al-Naqīb had been removed; later the sultan summoned him, and he died—together with his son al-Kamāl—when he was a little over seventy years old (3).
• Also among the deceased was the Chief Judge Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad (4) ibn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Qazwīnī (5), a Shāfiʿī. He and his brother arrived in Damascus from their homeland during the Mongol period, sometime after 690 AH, both being men of distinction. Imām al-Dīn (6) taught in the Mausoleum of Umm al-Ṣāliḥ, while Jalāl al-Dīn lectured at the Badrāʾiyya under Shaykh Burhān al-Dīn, son of Shaykh Tāj al-Dīn, the head of the Shāfiʿī school. Their circumstances fluctuated until Imām al-Dīn was appointed Shāfiʿī judge of Damascus, the post having been wrested for him from Qāḍī Badr al-Dīn ibn Jamāʿa. In the year of Ghāzān’s invasion he fled with the people to Egypt and died there, whereupon Ibn Jamāʿa was reinstated. When the office of preacher in the city fell vacant in 703 AH, Jalāl al-Dīn took it up. In 725 AH he was entrusted with the Damascus judiciary in addition to the pulpit, and in 727 AH he moved to Egypt after Chief Judge Badr al-Dīn ibn Jamāʿa was incapacitated by an affliction of the eyes. In 738 AH Sultan al-Malik al-Nāṣir became displeased with him over matters too lengthy to recount and banished him to Syria. The death of Chief Judge Shihāb al-Dīn ibn al-Majd ʿAbd Allāh, mentioned above, coincided with this, so the sultan once again appointed him judge of Syria. He then deputized his son Badr al-Dīn to act as vice-judge while retaining the pulpit of Damascus. He died late in this year (7) and was buried in the Ṣūfiyya.
He possessed outstanding mastery of maʿānī and bayān (semantics and rhetoric), issued numerous legal opinions, and produced several works on rhetoric, including a well-known treatise.