On the second of Rajab there died: the judge, imam, and scholar Shams al-Din (1) ibn Muflih al-Maqdisi, the Hanbali. He served as deputy shaykh for the Chief Judge Jamal al-Din Yusuf ibn Muhammad al-Maqdisi, likewise a Hanbali, and was married to his daughter, by whom he had seven children, both sons and daughters. He was a gifted, virtuous, and versatile scholar, adept in many disciplines, and especially in subsidiary jurisprudence (fiqh al-furūʿ). In transmitting the school of Imam Ahmad he reached the highest degree, and he compiled numerous works, among them al-Muqniʿ—about thirty volumes, as the Chief Judge Jamal al-Din informed me. He also wrote a two-volume commentary on Mahfūẓat Aḥkām al-Shaykh Majd al-Din ibn Taymiyyah (2), together with other useful treatises and notes—may Allah have mercy on him. He died at roughly fifty years of age. The funeral prayer was performed for him after ẓuhr on Thursday, the second of the month, in the al-Muẓaffari Mosque, and he was buried in the cemetery of Shaykh al-Muwafaq. His funeral was splendidly attended; all the judges and many notables were present. May Allah have mercy on him and honor his resting place.

On Saturday morning, the fourth of Rajab, the viceroy of the sultanate ordered that a group of residents of Qabr ʿĀtika (3) be beaten because they had shown disrespect toward him and his mamluks on account of a khutbah-mosque that had recently been refurbished in their neighborhood. Some of the fuqarāʾ wished to seize the mosque and turn it into a zāwiya for the whirling dervishes, but the Hanbali judge ruled that it should remain a congregational mosque—for a pulpit had already been installed there. The shaykh of the fuqarāʾ, however, produced a royal decree commanding that the building be handed over to him. The people of that quarter were loath to see the mosque revert to a mere zāwiya after it had become a proper place of worship, and they regarded the matter as a grave affront. Some of them spoke ill-advised words, whereupon the viceroy summoned a number of them, flogged them with whips in his presence, and had them paraded through the city; some of the common folk wished to object to this.

A hadith session was then scheduled to be held after maghrib beneath the Dome of the Eagle, on the chair normally used for Qur’an recitation. One of the sons of the judge ʿImad al-Din ibn al-Shirazi organized the gathering, and Shaykh ʿImad al-Din ibn al-Sarraj delivered the narration. A vast crowd assembled, and he read from al-Sīra al-Nabawiyya (4) from a copy in my own hand. This took place during the first ten days of the month.

A Wonder of Wonders: A young non-Arab from the lands of Tabriz and Khurasan arrived, claiming to have committed to memory al-Bukhari, Muslim, Jamiʿ al-Masanid, al-Kashshaf by al-Zamakhshari, and other similarly formidable works in various disciplines. On Wednesday, the last day of Rajab, he read from memory in the Umayyad Mosque, along its northern wall near the Gate of al-Kilāsa, from the beginning of Sahih al-Bukhari up to the middle of the Book of Knowledge. I checked his recital against a written copy I held in my hand; he performed well, although he—