Despite his youth, he was known for his intelligence and provided counsel on economic and military matters.[3][4] Abu Said was credited with the Sultan's decision to expand and consolidate the crown lands and to replace pastures with cultivated land.[4] Further strengthening ties between the two cousins, Abu Said married Muhammad II's daughter Fatima. The anonymous work al-Dahira al-Saniyya dates Abu Said's marriage to the year 664 AH (1265/1266), but modern historian María Jesús Rubiera Mata doubts the accuracy of this date: Fatima (born 659 AH) would have been a child then; additionally, the text confuses the bride as Muhammad I's daughter (while Fatima was his granddaughter), and says that the groom was his cousin (Abu Said was Muhammad I's nephew). Rubiera Mata suggests that the real marriage date was closer to the birth of the couple's first child, Ismail, in 1279.[5] In that year, the Nasrid dynasty finally regained Málaga from the Marinid Sultanate of Morocco—to whom the Banu Ashqilula rebels handed the city one year earlier—[6] and Abu Said was appointed to his father's former post of its governor.[3] He departed on 11 February 1279, while Fatima likely remained initially in the royal palace complex of Alhambra to give birth to Ismail, who was born on 3 March.[7]