He kept the company of the ḥāfiẓ Jaʿfar ibn Muḥammad al-Mustaghfiri, completed his training under him, and transmitted a great deal from him.

He also heard hadiths from ʿAbd al-Ṣamad al-ʿĀṣimī, Ḥamzah ibn Muḥammad al-Jaʿfarī, Abū Ḥafṣ ibn Masrūr, Abū ʿUthmān al-Ṣābūnī, Abū Saʿd al-Kanjrūdhī and their peers. His senior-most shaykh was Manṣūr al-Kāghadhī. He never travelled to Iraq, yet he both collected material and authored works.

Those who narrated from him include Ismāʿīl ibn Muḥammad al-Taymī, Wajīh al-Shaḥḥāmī, Abū al-Asʿad ibn al-Qushayrī, Muḥammad ibn Jāmiʿ the wool-carder, al-Junayd al-Qāʾinī (1), and others.

Al-Samʿānī relates: “I asked the ḥāfiẓ Ismāʿīl about him, and he said, ‘An imām and ḥāfiẓ—he listened, collected, and compiled.’”

ʿUmar ibn Muḥammad al-Nasafī writes in his book Al-Qand: “He is the imām, the ḥāfiẓ, the pillar of the Sunnah, Abū Muḥammad, a resident of Naysābūr. In his craft no one in his era, east or west, equalled him. He authored ‘Bahr al-Asānīd fī Ṣiḥāḥ al-Masānīd,’ in which he gathered one hundred thousand hadiths, arranging and refining them; nothing like it has appeared in Islam. It comprises eight hundred fascicles.”

ʿAbd al-Ghāfir says in Al-Sīyāq: “Abū Muḥammad had no peer in memorization. He settled in Naysābūr and reported copiously from al-Mustaghfiri. He died in Dhu al-Qaʿdah, 491 AH, at a little over eighty years of age.”