and they stirred up an uproar against him (1). Abū al-ʿAlāʾ Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad, the ḥāfiẓ, therefore stopped transmitting from him. For my part, during the days when I was reading The History to him, I never once saw him perform the prayer. It was Abū al-Qāsim the Damascene who informed us of his neglect of the prayer; he said:
“I came to him before sunrise. They woke him, and he came down so that we could read to him, yet he did not pray. When he was challenged about it he replied, ‘I have an excuse; I combine all the prayers together (2).’”
Perhaps he later repented—may Allah forgive him. He was an expert in the conditions of transmission, and in the judicial assembly he was the authority upon whom reliance was placed.
He died in Nishapur on the tenth of Rabīʿ al-Ākhir in the year 533 AH (3).
I say: it is sheer acquisitiveness that drives us to narrate from someone like this.
Among those who narrated from him were Abū Mūsā al-Madīnī, al-Samʿānī, Ibn ʿAsākir (4), Ṣāʿid ibn Rajāʾ, Manṣūr ibn Abī al-Ḥasan al-Ṭabarī, ʿAlī ibn al-Qāsim al-Thaqafī, Maḥmūd ibn Aḥmad al-Muḍarī, Abū Aḥmad ibn Sukayna, Abū al-Majd Zāhir al-Thaqafī, ʿAbd al-Laṭīf ibn Muḥammad al-Khwārazmī, Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad ibn al-Junayd, ʿAbd al-Bāqī ibn ʿUthmān al-Hamadhānī, Ibrāhīm ibn Baraka al-Bayyāʿ, Ibrāhīm ibn Ḥamadiyya (5), ʿAlī ibn Muḥammad ibn ʿAlī ibn Yaʿīsh, Mawdūd ibn Muḥammad al-Harawī, al-Muʾayyad ibn Muḥammad al-Ṭūsī, Zaynab al-Shaʿriyya (6), and ʿAbd