He was trained in the tenets of the Hanbali school (madhhab) for eleven years under scholars such as the Qadi Abu Ya'la ibn al-Farra'.
[1] In one of his reminiscences, he remarks that his Hanbali companions wanted him to abandon the company of certain scholars, and complains that it hindered him from acquiring useful knowledge.
[3] Ibn 'Aqil leaned strongly toward Ash'arism; he had signed, around 455, the fatwa protesting against its persecution, and it was he who, in 476, performed the ablutions on the body of his friend, Abu Ishaq al-Shirazi, the Ash'arite rector of the Nizamiyya.
[2] Among his works of jurisprudence that have survived are Wadih fi usul al-fiqh and (in part) Kitab al-funun, a huge collection of anecdotes about the attitudes and customs of his times, in one hundred volumes.
In the eighth decade of my life, I do indeed experience a zeal for learning more intense than that experienced when I was a young man of twenty.