The Imām, ḥāfiẓ, hadith critic, erudite scholar, and Shaykh of the muhaddithūn, Abū ʿAbd Allāh Ibn al-Bayyiʿ (1) al-Dabbī, al-Ṭahmānī, the Nishapuri Shāfiʿī and prolific author.
Birth: Monday, the 3rd of Rabīʿ al-Awwal, 321 AH, in Nishapur.
He was directed to this discipline while still a boy through the care of his father and his maternal uncle. His first formal audition was in 330 AH, and in 334 AH—when he was thirteen—he served as recorder for Abū Ḥātim ibn Ḥibbān.
He secured lofty chains of transmission in Khurāsān, Iraq, and Transoxiana, and heard from about two thousand shaykhs, give or take; in Nishapur alone he received hadith from one thousand individuals. He travelled to Iraq at the age of twenty and arrived shortly after the death of Ismāʿīl al-Ṣaffār.
He narrated from: his father—who had met Muslim, the author of the Ṣaḥīḥ—; Muḥammad ibn ʿAlī al-Mudhakkir; Muḥammad ibn Yaʿqūb al-Aṣamm; Muḥammad ibn Yaʿqūb al-Shaybānī, Ibn al-Akhram; Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad ibn Bāluwayh al-Jallāb; Abū Jaʿfar Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad ibn Saʿīd al-Rāzī, the companion of Ibn Wārah; Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn Aḥmad al-Ṣaffār; and the two associates of al-Ḥasan ibn ʿArafah: