and the Ways of the Devout,” which included material on asceticism, heart-softening counsel, exhortation, the life of the Messenger—peace and blessings be upon him—his noble Companions, and the righteous predecessors who came after them. He filled it with many admonitions and counsels. At its beginning, he writes:

“My two sons, may Allah grant you success. When I saw that exhortation is among the remedies of the heart and the means of disciplining the soul, and that my earlier writings on hadith, jurisprudence, legal theory, dialectics, and other related branches of knowledge contained material which I hoped—if you studied it—would help you attain what I desire for you, I decided to compile for you a book of this kind. With Allah’s aid, I would safeguard it from much of what those who have written in this field fall into: deviation from the doctrines of the learned and excess that departs from the path of the people of truth. It would draw attention to insights not found in the books of the jurists and instill the character exemplified by earlier scholars. At its beginning, I placed supplications, opening with supplications from the Quran. I then followed these with accounts of virtues that stir one to action in times of lassitude, and exhortations that soften hearts and cure them of hardness.”

The Sons of Abū al-Walīd al-Bājī

Abū al-Hasan Muhammad

The two boys grew older, and their father’s upbringing bore fruit: they grew up righteous. Yet his joy was not to be complete, for the father was stricken by the death of one of his two sons, Abū al-Hasan Muhammad. He had been noble, intelligent, and full of promise, so his father mourned him in poignant elegies, including the following lines about him: