Abu Saʿd al-Samʿani said: “Abu Salih was a ḥafiz and a Sufi, precise, peerless in gathering material and imparting it. For a period he gave the call to prayer purely for the sake of Allah, preached at night, and engaged in devotional glorification at the Bayhaqi madrasa. The waqf collections of books and hadith fascicles were under his supervision; he watched over their safekeeping. He would take the charitable contributions of merchants and notables and deliver them to those who deserved them ⦗1⦘.
Ahmad ibn Hibat Allah informed us; Zayn al-Umanaʾ al-Hasan ibn Muhammad informed us; my uncle, the ḥafiz Abu al-Qasim, informed us—in the year 559 AH; Ismaʿil ibn Abi Salih informed us; my father informed us; Abu al-Hasan Muhammad ibn al-Husayn informed us; ʿUbayd Allah ibn Ibrahim al-Muzakki informed us; Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab al-Farraʾ narrated to us; al-Husayn ibn al-Walid narrated to us; from Qays ⦗2⦘ from Ibn Abi Layla, from Abu al-Zubayr, from Jabir, who said:
“The delegation of Juhaynah came to the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him. A young boy stood up and began to speak, whereupon the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, said, ‘So where are your elders?’”
al-Bukhari nos. 4908, 5251-5253, 5258, 5264, 5332-5333, 7160; Muslim no. 1471 (sections 1-14); Abu Dawud nos. 2179-2185; al-Tirmidhi nos. 1175-1176; Ibn Majah no. 2019; Ibn al-Jarud nos. 733-736; Ahmad, Musnad, 2/6, 43, 51, 54, 61, 63-64, 79-81, 102, 104, 145-146; al-Tahawi, Sharh maʿani al-athar, 3/51-53; al-Tayalisi 1/313; al-Darimi 2/160; al-Darqutni 4/5-8; al-Bayhaqi 7/323-327.
(1) See the account in Muʿjam al-udabaʾ, vol. 3, pp. 224-225, which is longer than the passage reproduced here; also Tadhkirat al-huffaz, vol. 3, p. 1163.
(2) Omitted in the base manuscript and restored from the author’s Tadhkira. The narrator Qays here is Qays ibn al-Rabiʿ al-Asadi al-Kufi; al-Hafiz states in al-Taqrib that he is “trustworthy, but his reliability declined in old age; his son added material not from his hadith, which he then transmitted.” Ibn Abi Layla is Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Rahman, whose memory was poor, and Abu al-Zubayr is a mudallis who narrates with ambiguous chains. The author remarks in his Tadhkira, 3/1165, after citing this report: “extremely odd.”
His phrase “fa-ayna al-kibar” means “where is the eldest?”—an allusion to the hadith of al-qasama recorded by al-Bukhari, 10/443, Book of Manners, chapter “Honouring the Elder,” and by Muslim, no. 1669. In that narration the Companions began discussing their case, and ʿAbd al-Rahman—being the youngest—started to speak; the Prophet said to him, “kabbir al-kubar” (“let the elder speak first”). Yahya ibn Saʿid, one of the transmitters, explained that the command means: give precedence in speech to the oldest among you.