They ranged through every quarter of the city, sometimes injuring people and obstructing the roads in the middle of the night. Their soiling of public places was frequent; the trial had become widespread and it was hard to ward off. I even compiled a brief tract on the hadiths that speak of killing them and on the jurists’ dispute as to whether those reports were abrogated. ʿUthman (1)—may Allah be pleased with him—used to command from the pulpit that pigeons be slaughtered and dogs killed, and Mālik, in the narration of Ibn Wahb, explicitly allowed the killing of the dogs of a particular town when the ruler authorizes it for the public good.
On Monday, the 28th of that month, Zayn al-Din ʿAbd al-Rahman (2), son of our shaykh, the hadith master al-Mizzi, died in the Dār al-Ḥadīth al-Nūriyyah, of which he was the head, and was buried in the Ṣūfī cemetery beside his father.
In the middle of Jumada al-Akhirah the mortality grew severe and increased—Allah’s help is sought. Multitudes of both elite and commoners, those we knew and those we did not, died—may Allah be pleased with them and admit them to His Garden; Allah’s help is sought.
On most days more than one hundred dead were prayed over in the congregational mosque—indeed, to Allah we belong and to Him we return—while some of the deceased were not even brought to the mosque. As for the countryside around the city and its outskirts, none but Allah—glorified is He—knows how many died there. May He be pleased with them; amen.
On Monday, the 27th of that same month, al-Ṣadr Shams al-Din (3) ibn al-Sabbab (4), the travelling merchant who built the Sabbābiyyah Madrasa—a Qur’an school near the Ẓāhiriyyah, south of the Great ʿĀdiliyyah—passed away. That plot had long been an unsightly ruin, but he rebuilt it and made it a house of Qur’an recitation and a hadith school for the Ḥanbalīs. He and others endowed it with fine waqfs—may Allah have mercy on him.
On Friday, the 8th of Rajab, the absentee funeral prayer was held in the Umayyad Mosque after the Friday service for the judge ʿAlāʾ al-Din, son of Qāḍī Shuhbah (5). Thereafter the funeral prayer was offered for forty-one souls at once. The interior of the mosque could not contain their rows, so some of the dead were carried out to the area in front of Bāb al-Sir. The preacher and the naqīb came out and prayed over them all there. It was a scene long to be remembered and a powerful lesson—indeed, to Allah we belong and to Him we return.