in the year 332 AH. (1)

Al-Khaṭīb said: I heard the judge Abū Bakr Muḥammad ibn ʿUmar al-Dāwūdī say, “I heard Abū Ḥafṣ ibn Shāhīn remark, ‘I have calculated how much I have spent on ink up to this point, and it comes to seven hundred dirhams.’”

Al-Dāwūdī added, “We used to buy ink—four ratls for a single dirham.”

He (al-Dāwūdī) went on: “And Abū Ḥafṣ kept on writing for a further period after that.” (2)

Hamza al-Sahmī said: “I heard al-Dāraquṭnī say, ‘Ibn Shāhīn is persistent in error, yet he is reliable.’”

Abū al-Walīd al-Bājī said: “He is reliable.”

Abū al-Qāsim al-Azhari said: “He was reliable, and he possessed seven hundred fascicles transmitted from al-Baghawī.”

Al-Khaṭīb also related: I heard Muḥammad ibn ʿUmar al-Dāwūdī say, “Ibn Shāhīn is reliable; he resembles the veteran shaykhs, except that he was prone to grammatical mistakes. He likewise knew nothing of fiqh, whether little or much; and when the schools of the jurists—such as al-Shāfiʿī’s and others—were mentioned to him, he would say, ‘My school is Muḥammadan.’”

Abū al-Ḥasan al-Dāraquṭnī once said to me, “How blind is the heart of Abū Ḥafṣ ibn Shāhīn! He brought me his Tafsīr, which he had compiled, and asked me to correct the mistakes in it. I discovered that he had copied the Tafsīr of Abū al-Jārūd, scattered it through his own work, and cited it as ‘from Abū al-Jārūd, from Ziyād ibn al-Mundhir,’ whereas ‘Abū al-Jārūd’ is in fact the kunya of Ziyād ibn al-Mundhir himself.”

Al-Dāwūdī then said: “I heard Ibn Shāhīn declare, ‘I write, but I do not collate.’”

Al-Barqānī reported the same about him—meaning that Ibn Shāhīn relied on his own accuracy in what he transmitted—and commented: “For that reason I did not take a great deal from him, out of cautiousness toward him.” (3)