The biographer al-Mālikī reports that, in the year A.H. 171, Rūh b. Hatam, the governor of the Maghrib, offered the post of qādī to ‘Abd Allāh b. Farūk, a scholar-jurist of Qairawān. ‘Ibn Farūk firmly refused the offer. The governor, however, forced him to take his seat in the mosque and ordered the litigants to address their pleas to him, Ibn Farūk weeping the while and crying to them: “Have mercy upon me, that Allah may have mercy upon you”. When he thus refused to judge, the governor ordered that he be bound and taken up to the roof of the mosque: if he should then still refuse he was to be thrown over the edge.