al-Raḥmān say: “I heard Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd Allāh al-Ṭabarānī relate:

“One day I rose in your father’s gathering—may Allah have mercy on him—and said: ‘Shaykh, among us are some people who keep company with that ill-omened man—I mean Abū Nuʿaym the Ashʿarī.’ He answered, ‘Expel them.’

“So we removed So-and-so and So-and-so from the session. Then he declared: ‘Whoever visits them is forbidden to enter our assembly, to listen to us, or to transmit from us; if he does so, he will find no dispensation with us.’

I said: Enjoining what is right may at times push a person into anger and severity, causing him to fall into the unlawful form of boycotting, and it can even lead to plotting and the pursuit of bloodshed. Abū ʿAbd Allāh enjoyed the utmost prestige and respect in his town, and he stirred up such agitation against Aḥmad ibn ʿAbd Allāh the ḥāfiẓ (1) that Aḥmad went into hiding.

Abū ʿAbd Allāh authored a large single-volume work on faith, a book on the soul and spirit, and another refuting the Lafziyya.

When he simply transmitted a ḥadith and remained silent, he did well; but when he set chapter headings or spoke on his own, he swerved and became abrasive (2). In truth, his fault—and that of Abū Nuʿaym—is that both relate weak and fabricated reports without laying them bare. We ask Allah for pardon.

I have received a number of Abū ʿAbd Allāh’s narrations by ijāzah (formal authorization), but none reached me with a continuous chain. The last person to transmit a ḥadith with an elevated chain was the judge Najm al-Dīn ibn Ḥamdān.

Abū Zakariyyā Yaḥyā ibn Abī Manṣūr al-Faqīh informed us, in his book, in the year four