Abū ‘Alī Muḥammad b. ‘Ali b. al-Ḥasan b. Muqlah, better known as Ibn Muqlah, was born in Baghdad in A.H. 272 (I. Kh.). It has been said that “the details of the childhood of great men are apt to be petty and cloying”; the historians have not provided an opportunity of judging of the truth of this generalization in his case, for their notices only begin when he had already set about earning a livelihood. He worked in one of the dīwāns or administrative departments on a salary of six dīnārs per mensem (Fakh., 318). Fortune favoured him, and while yet very young he came to enjoy intimacy with and a share in the counsels of Ibnu'l-Furāt during the first term of his wazirate, which extended from 296, the year following the accession of the Khalīfah al-Muqtadir, to 299. He had a turn for composition both in prose and verse, and well illustrated the Arab adage: “the pen is one of the two tongues” (al-‘Iqdu'l-Farīd, ii, 153, Cairo, 1316). Specimens of his verses will be given later; Ibn Miskawayh quotes his prose-account of the circumstances in which news of the murder in 296 of Md. b. Dāaūd b. al-Jarrāḥ, after he had been enticed from the place where he had concealed himself when his intrigue on behalf of Ibnu'l-Mu‘tazz miscarried, was secretly communicated to Ibnu'l-Furāt; he there states that on this occasion he was a companion of the wazir's privacy (TU., 66).