Muhammad ibn Ali al-Suri the muhaddith

Abu 'Abdallah Muhammad ibn 'Ali ibn 'Abdallah al-Suri; he heard hadith at Sidon from Abu'l-Husayn ibn Jami', his highest-linked shaykh, then accompanied the hafiz 'Abd al-Ghani writing from him and other Egyptians, and sought hadith himself into old age, reaching Baghdad in 418 where he heard Ibn Makhlad and those after him. Among the most eager and prolific writers of hadith — eighty lines to a page — he went on to Kufa and heard from four hundred shaykhs. ²

Ibn al-Tayyuri said most of al-Khatib's books apart from Tarikh Baghdad drew on al-Suri's; he divided his estate into some thirty-five shares and left twelve loads of books to his lodge at Tyre; he fasted perpetually save the two festivals and had lost one eye. He died at the hospital on the last Wednesday of Jumada al-Akhira 441, aged over sixty — killed when the physician bled him by mistake with a poisoned lancet prepared for another — and was buried in the mosque cemetery. ²