The Life of Ibn Ḥanbal. Ibn al-Jawzi

vain debate.¹¹¹

      I thought it must have been Muḥammad ibn Yaḥyā l-Dhuhlī who had handed me the paper. Later, though, I found Muḥammad and asked him about it, and he said, “I never saw you and I never gave you a piece of paper.”

      It was then that I realized that the poem had been an admonition.

       CHAPTER 19

      HIS FAME

      In the chapter about his childhood, we noted that Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal was highly regarded even as a youth. 19.1

      [Al-Marrūdhī:] I once said to Aḥmad, “There are a lot of people praying for you.”

      “That frightens me,” he said. “It could be a temptation to think highly of myself. Why do they do it?”

      I once told him that I had met a man from Tarsus who said that he had been fighting the Byzantines. In the still of the night, he told me, the men would call out “Pray to God for Abū ʿAbd Allāh!” He went on: “We would pull back the arm of the mangonel¹¹² and then release it. Once we shot a stone at a barbarian¹¹³ standing on a rampart behind his shield, and the stone knocked off his head and the shield both.”¹¹⁴

      Aḥmad’s face fell, and he said, “If only it weren’t a temptation!”

      Then he said, “Do you think it’s a temptation?”

      “Of course not,” I answered.

      [Al-Abbār:] We’d been marching along the Balkh River for several days when our provisions ran out, so two of us headed off toward Bukhārā to buy something to eat. On the way we met a blond-haired, red-faced man who asked us where we were from. When we told him we were from Baghdad, he asked, “How is Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal?” 19.2

      “When we left, he was alive and well.”

      The man raised his head and prayed to God for Aḥmad’s well-being.

      “Now I’ve seen it all,” I said to my companion. “Even here, on the frontier of Islam, among the Turks!”

      [Al-Marrūdhī:] I once told Aḥmad that someone had said that from here as far as the land of the Turks, people were praying for his well-being. I asked him how he showed his gratitude for the popularity God had blessed him with. 19.3

      “I pray to God that I do nothing for the sake of appearances,” he said.

      [ʿAbd Allāh:] Bilāl and I went to see Muḥammad ibn Saʿīd al-Tirmidhī, who told us, “A group of us were at Wahb ibn Jarīr’s. Aḥmad was there too. He asked me to read,¹¹⁵ but I didn’t.” 19.4

      We asked him why not.

      “I didn’t want to read because Aḥmad might say something, or show some kind of reaction, and people would start talking about it.”

      [Aḥmad ibn al-Ḥusayn:] I heard a man from Khurasan say, “Back home people think Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal isn’t human. They think he’s some kind of angel.” 19.5

      I also heard from a man who had been at the frontier that people there were saying, “One look from Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal is better than”—or “equal to”—“a year’s worth of ritual devotion.”

      [ʿAlī ibn al-Jahm:] Once when I was young I saw crowds of people rushing by and asked where they were going. They told me, “There’s a man here who saw Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal!” 19.6

      I asked the man if he had really seen Aḥmad.

      “I prayed in his mosque,” he replied.

      [Al-Qūmisī:] Two Zoroastrian women had a dispute over an inheritance and went to a scholar for arbitration. The scholar ruled against one woman, who said, “If you’ve judged according to what Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal would say, I accept; otherwise I don’t.” 19.7

      The scholar replied that he had ruled as Ibn Ḥanbal would have, and the woman accepted the judgment.¹¹⁶

      Al-Marrūdhī said: “I once saw a Christian doctor coming out of Aḥmad’s house with a priest or maybe a monk. I heard the doctor tell someone, ‘He asked to come with me so he could get a look at Aḥmad.’” 19.8

      Al-Marrūdhī said: “I once brought a Christian to Aḥmad’s house to treat him. ‘Aḥmad,’ he told him, ‘I’ve been hoping to meet you for years. Your well-being concerns not only the Muslims but everyone else as well. You’ve never given any of us cause for complaint.’”

      I said to Aḥmad, “If only everyone everywhere would pray for you.”

      “So long as a man knows himself,” he replied, “it makes no difference what people say.”

      [ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿAdī:] I heard Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd Allāh al-Ṣayrafī addressing students of the Shāfiʿī system as follows: “Take careful note of what happened to Ḥusayn al-Karābīsī and Abū Thawr. Ḥusayn was famous for his learning and his powers of retention, which were ten times greater than Abū Thawr’s. But when Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal objected to Ḥusayn’s view of utterance¹¹⁷ Ḥusayn lost his reputation, and when Aḥmad praised Abū Thawr for sticking to the sunnah, his reputation grew.” 19.9

      [Ibn Rāhawayh:] I once went to see ʿAbd Allāh ibn Ṭāhir, who said, “I’ve never seen anything like these Postponers!¹¹⁸ They’ll say, ‘My faith is as strong as Gabriel’s,’ but by God I don’t think it’s right even to say, ‘My faith is as strong as Yaḥyā ibn Yaḥyā’s, or Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal’s.’” 19.10

      [Muḥammad ibn Yaḥyā:] I’ve never seen generousity as meaningful as Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal’s. I used to hear Hadith from him in the morning and dictate it to my students that same evening. 19.11

      [Aḥmad:] I traveled to Sanaa in Yemen with Yaḥyā ibn Maʿīn. We arrived around the time of the afternoon prayer and asked where ʿAbd al-Razzāq’s house was. They told us he lived in a village called al-Ramādah. I was so eager to meet him that I went on ahead, but Yaḥyā stayed behind. It wasn’t that far from Sanaa. As soon as I asked, they pointed out the house. But then when I went to knock on the door, a grocer across the street said, “Don’t knock; the shaykh is a terror.” 19.12

      So I sat down to wait until it was almost time for the sunset prayer. When ʿAbd al-Razzāq came out to pray, I jumped up, holding out some Hadith I had chosen.

      “Peace be upon you!” I said. “Will you recite these for me, please? I’ve come a long way.”

      “Who are you?” he asked.

      “Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal.”

      When he heard that, he stopped and drew his shoulders together as if to make himself smaller. Then he turned back and embraced me. “Are you really Aḥmad?” he asked. He took the Hadith reports and started reading them, not stopping until it got too dark for him to see. He asked the grocer for a lamp and kept going until the time for the sunset prayer—which he usually performed at the last possible time—had passed.

      [ʿAbd Allāh:] Whenever my father recalled learning that he had been praised in the presence of ʿAbd al-Razzāq, he would weep.

      [Abū l-ʿAbbās al-Ḥaṭṭāb:] Back when many of the great men were still with us, I took some slips of paper and wrote down their names, one on each slip: Aswad ibn Sālim, Bishr ibn al-Ḥārith, Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal, and so on. Then I prayed two cycles and asked God, mighty and glorious, to choose one for me as an exemplar. I shuffled the slips and put them out of sight, then picked one. To my delight, it turned out to be Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal. I prayed two more cycles, invoked