I said: In the usage of the people of the Maghrib, “the East” (al-Mashriq) begins with Egypt and extends beyond it to Greater Syria, Iraq, and the lands that follow. Likewise, among the Persians and the Iraqis, “the West” (al-Maghrib) also starts with Egypt and includes everything lying further west.

Abū al-Qāsim Ibn Bashkuwāl (1) said: “Abū ʿAmr was one of the leading imams in the sciences of the Quran—its transmissions, exegesis, meanings, methods of recitation, and grammatical parsing. In all of this he produced fine and beneficial compositions. He was also versed in hadith, its transmission routes, and the names of its narrators and transmitters. His handwriting was elegant, his notation precise. He possessed sharp intelligence, an extraordinary memory, versatility in the sciences, and was devout, upright, scrupulous, and firmly committed to the sunnah.”

In the Fahras of Ibn ʿUbayd Allah al-Ḥajarī it is stated: “The ḥāfiẓ Abū ʿAmr al-Dānī—one of the shaykhs said, ‘In his time, and even after his time, no one equalled him in memorization and verification.’ He used to say, ‘I have never seen anything without writing it down, never written anything without memorizing it, and never memorized anything and then forgotten it.’”

He would be asked a question concerning the transmitted reports or the speech of the early generations, and he would cite it in full, complete with its chain of authorities from his own teachers back to the original source.

I say: With Abū ʿAmr, the disciplines of the qirāʾāt and of the muṣḥafs reached their culmination, even as he excelled in hadith, tafsīr, grammar, and other fields.

He authored Jāmiʿ al-Bayān fī al-Sabʿ in three volumes, encompassing both the well-known and the rarer readings; the book al-Taysīr (2); and the book al-Iqtiṣād fī al-Sabʿ.