The ḥāfiẓ Abū Zakariyyā Yaḥyā ibn Abī ʿAmr said: “I heard Abū al-Ḥusayn the judge relate that he had heard ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Nakhshabī say:
‘Abū Nuʿaym did not hear the entire Musnad of al-Ḥārith ibn Abī Usāma from Abū Bakr ibn Khallād, yet he went on to report it in full.’
The ḥāfiẓ Ibn al-Najjār countered, ‘He is mistaken in this. I have seen an old copy of the book on which Abū Nuʿaym’s own hand writes: “So-and-so heard from me up to the end of my audition of this Musnad from Ibn Khallād.” It is likely that he transmitted the remainder by ijāzah.’ He then added:
If every soul on earth were to pelt the star,
Not a single stone would ever reach the star. (1)
I say: Abū ʿAbd Allāh Ibn Manda used to speak with biting severity against Abū Nuʿaym (2) because of the disputed creed that divided the Hanbalīs and the followers of Abū al-Ḥasan al-Ashʿarī. In his History, Abū Nuʿaym also took Ibn Manda to task. The weakness of the polemics traded by competing contemporaries is well known.
We ask Allah for pardon.
The two ḥāfiẓes Ibn Khalīl and al-Ḍiyāʾ carried to Syria a sizeable collection of Abū Nuʿaym’s works and narrations. Our teachers received them from those two, and our own shaykh Abū al-Ḥajjāj possesses a great deal of that material through a lofty ijāzah—including the Ḥilya and the Mustadrak upon Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim.
The ḥāfiẓ Abū Nuʿaym died on the twentieth of Muḥarram in the year 430 AH, at the age of ninety-four.