Facsimile · p. 147
To Falana, I have no witness to discredit him. He said to him, "Yesterday I fought him before giving testimony, so his testimony is invalidated." And tell the judge, "There is enmity between me and him." Al-Barzali narrated in his book on marriage from his fatwas, from Ibn Alwan, the Mufti of Tunis, that a woman treated her husband badly and found it difficult to get rid of him. He said to her, "Accuse him of having vitiligo inside his anus." So she accused him of that, and the judge ruled that he should be examined. When the husband saw that, he divorced her. He said, "He was known for his trickery in some matters." This trickery is permissible if it is proven to him that she is wronged, to save her from injustice. Otherwise, the correct opinion is that it is not permissible because it is from prompting the opponent, and that invalidates justice. Abd al-Latif al-Khatib, son of al-Khatib Ammar, was born in Sennar and held the position of preacher in place of his father. A glimpse of his biography: He was Sheikh al-Islam, the jurist, the grammarian, the linguist, the usuli, the mutakallim, the logician, the master of the Quran, and an ijtihad scholar in the Shafi'i school. He performed the Hajj to the Sacred House of God due to a calamity that befell him from the Sultan, and he resided there as a result. He met scholars from the Maghreb, Hijaz, Rum, and Takrur, and became firmly established in all fields. There was no field among people that he did not excel in, and it was said that he was unique in his time in it. Some of the people of the Haram praised him and said about him in beautiful and eloquent prose: "He is the scholar of the Sennar lands and the sign of the Islamic regions." His teacher in logic, Sheikh Nur al-Din al-Yemeni, praised him in a poem, saying, may God have mercy on him: Ibn Ammar is a skilled and capable leader, a paradise and a refuge for the fearful. His house has become a garden of knowledge, so enter it in peace and security. He also said in another poem: A scholar of all kinds of knowledge, he encompassed in the world the rational and the transmitted. Thus, the merits of his qualities flew to the Haram and the earth, along with all the inhabitants. He is an orator whose excellence cannot be matched, just as the obligatory has precedence over the voluntary. A chosen, pious one who emulates his ancestors, and he who resembles his fathers has indeed brought virtue. And one came from the land of Kanjara and praised him in the style of logicians, saying: To the presence of one who is characterized by the conventional, particular, affirmative, and universal, and beautiful productive syllogisms, who captivated minds with his universals and particulars, our master and our lord, the eye of man, residing in the heart with two laments, the exalted and noble father, the supporter of the Sunnah, the jurist Abd al-Latif. May God protect him and care for him, and bestow upon him such beautiful qualities that description and definition are incapable of encompassing their premises, and may He banish his enemies.