among the hadith scholars. In the closing years of his life he became confused, and he began to relate from Ibn Asīd, the nephew of Abū Zurʿah al-Rāzī, and from Ibn al-Jārūd, even though people had only heard him say that he possessed written permissions from them. He also made slips in his dictations and attributed to several people doctrinal views for which they were never known—may Allah veil faults and grant protection (1).

I say: We pay no attention to what you say about your opponent on account of the running feud between you, just as we do not listen to what he says about you. I have in fact seen Ibn Manda launch a scathing, even censorious, attack on Abū Nuʿaym—accusing him of innovation and other things I would rather not repeat. Yet each of them is, in himself, truthful and—praise be to Allah—free of any suspicion in his transmission.

Aḥmad al-Bāṭirqānī said: The leading scholar of his age, Abū Aḥmad al-ʿAssāl, wrote from Nīshāpūr to Ibn Manda about a hadith whose meaning puzzled him, and Ibn Manda replied, clarifying it and pointing out its defect (2).

More than one transmitter relates from Abū Isḥāq ibn Ḥamzah that he said, “I have never seen anyone comparable to Abū ʿAbd Allāh ibn Manda” (3).

ʿAlī ibn Aḥmad—and a group with him—reported to me from Zāhir ibn Aḥmad; Zāhir told us: al-Ḥusayn ibn ʿAbd al-Malik said, “ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Abī ʿAbd Allāh wrote to me that his father copied from four shaykhs a total of four thousand fascicles. They were: Abū Saʿīd ibn al-Aʿrābī, Abū al-ʿAbbās al-Aṣamm, Khaythamah al-Aṭrābulusī, and al-Haytham al-Shāshī. He also said, ‘I heard my father state: I wrote from one thousand seven hundred persons’ (4).”