He transmitted ḥadīth from al-Qāḍī al-Maḥāmilī, Abū al-ʿAbbās Ibn ʿUqda, Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad al-Adamī the Qur’an–reciter, Muḥammad ibn Ṣāliḥ ibn Ziyād, and Aḥmad ibn ʿAlī al-Jawzajānī, and he dictated a number of public sessions (1).

Among those who narrated from him were al-Barqānī, Abū al-Qāsim al-Tanūkhī, Abū al-Ḥusayn Ibn al-Naqqūr, and others.

Al-Khaṭīb notes that all his autograph notebooks had been lost except for two fascicles of material he had personally heard. He then said: “ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Maḥāmilī informed us; al-Dāraquṭnī informed us, saying:

‘The judge Abū ʿAbd Allāh al-Ḍabbī reached the pinnacle of virtue and devotion, was learned in judicial matters, adept at drafting court records and official correspondence, and was granted success in all his affairs.’” (2)

Al-Barqānī remarked: “He was a definitive authority in ḥadīth. Of all that he possessed through direct audition there remained only two fascicles; the rest he held by written licence.” (3)

Al-Ḍabbī died in Basra in Shawwāl of the year 398 AH, after first serving as judge of al-Karkh; the judiciaries of Madīnat al-Manṣūr and Kūfa were later added to his charge. (4)

In that same year there also died: al-Badīʿ al-Hamadhānī—the master of epistolary prose and the Maqāmāt—Abū al-Faḍl Aḥmad ibn al-Ḥusayn ibn Yaḥyā, the celebrated littérateur known as “Wonder of the Age” (5); the Imām Abū Bakr Aḥmad ibn ʿAlī ibn Aḥmad ibn Lāl al-Hamadhānī (6); the ḥadīth scholar Abū Naṣr al-Kalābādhī (7); and the shaykh—