and disparagement of him; nevertheless, he agreed with him on this point. Abū ‘Alī al-Ahwāzī stated that fewer than thirty years had passed since his school gained strength. Al-Ahwāzī died in 445 AH.

Ibn ‘Asākir said: “As for his statement that it has been thirty years since it gained strength, by my life, this affiliation only became widely known in the time of Judge Abū Bakr ibn al-Bāqillānī, whose well-regarded works circulated throughout Baghdad and other cities and regions.”

The point here is that the well-known shaykhs whose names Shaykh Abū ‘Abd al-Rahmān compiled in his book Tabaqāt al-Sūfiyyah (Generations of the Sufis), and whose accounts and sayings he collected—let alone the leading ascetics before them among the Companions and Successors, whose sayings Abū ‘Abd al-Rahmān and others collected in well-known books, and who are the ones