‘Alī al-‘Alawī, on the authority of Abū ʿAbd Allāh al-Juʿfī. Those who transmitted from him include al-Ḥumaydī, Jaʿfar al-Ḥakkāk, Ibn al-Khāḍiba, Abū Muslim ʿUmar ibn ʿAlī al-Laythī, and ʿAbd al-Muḥsin al-Shayḥī.

He compiled for himself a personal muʿjam (biographical index) and copied a large number of manuscripts. He used to say, “While still a boy I would recite to the shaykhs, so the people exclaimed, ‘You are Ubayy!’ because of the excellence of my recitation. My first audition was in the year 432 AH. I caught up with al-Barmakī, from whom I heard three fascicles before he died.”

ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Anmāṭī said: “He possessed penetrating knowledge,” and he described him as a master memoriser of proven accuracy. Ibn Nāṣir said: “He was trustworthy, a ḥāfiẓ, precise—we have never seen his equal (1). He performed tahajjud and stood in night prayer. Abū Ṭāhir ibn Salafah once read a hadith to him which he repudiated, saying, ‘That is not from my narrations.’ When questioned, he replied, ‘I know every one of my hadith, for I have reviewed them many times; nothing of them is hidden from me.’”

Beginning in Rajab of 498 AH he used to leave Kūfa each year, stay in Baghdad until after the Festival of Breaking the Fast, then return. To support his family he earned a wage copying texts. Abū ʿĀmir al-ʿAbdarī likewise praised him, saying, “This discipline has been sealed with Ubayy—may Allah have mercy on him.”

Ubayy fell ill in Baghdad and was carried off; death overtook him in al-Ḥillah. His body was transported to Kūfa, where he was buried. He died on the sixteenth of Shaʿbān, 510 AH.

The author says: He lived eighty-six years.