Aḥmad al-Lakhmī, the Andalusian from Almería, known as al-Rushāṭī.
He transmitted ḥadith from Abū ʿAlī al-Ghassānī, Abū al-Ḥasan ibn al-Dush, Abū ʿAlī ibn Sukkara, Ibn Fathūn, and others.
As Abū Jaʿfar ibn al-Zubayr relates, he authored his extensive volume entitled Borrowing of Lights and Seeking of Flowers on the Lineages of the Transmitters of Traditions (1), the book Clarification of the Errors Found in al-Dāraqutnī’s Kitāb al-Mukhtalif wa al-Muʾtalif, a treatise in which he refuted the qāḍī Abū Muḥammad ibn ʿAṭiyya, and other works besides.
He was exacting, a skilled muhaddith, an imām, an authority on the biographical evaluation of narrators, a preserver of history and genealogy, and an accomplished jurist—one of the eminent figures singled out for distinction.
Those who reported from him include Abū Muḥammad ibn (2) ʿUbayd Allāh, Abū Bakr ibn Khayr (3), Ibn Maḍāʾ, Abū Khālid (4) ibn Rifāʿa, Abū Muḥammad ibn (2) ʿAbd al-Raḥīm, Abū Bakr ibn Abī Jamrah (5), and others.
…Hence, those who read the nisba with a short a (rashati) say that one of his forefathers was called Rashata and the family name was derived from him. Those who read it with a short u (rushati) maintain that it goes back to a wet-nurse of his, a non-Arab woman named Barashata, or that she used to dandle him saying “Rushata,” and the epithet stuck to him.
As for Ibn Khallikan, he states that the nisba is linked neither to a tribe nor to a locality. Rather, the biographee himself reports in the cited book that one of his ancestors had a large birth-mark, and that he was brought up by a foreign wet-nurse who, while playing with him, would say “Rushatala.” Because she repeated it so often he came to be called al-Rushati.
(1) Al-Sila, al-Wafayat, and Kashf al-Zunun record the title as “… on the genealogies of the Companions and the transmitters of traditions.” It is one of the sources on which the hadith scholar Ibn Hajar relied in his Tabsir al-Muntabih (Introduction, 1/2). See also Kashf al-Zunun, 1/134.
(2) The word “ibn” is missing in Tadhkirat al-Huffaz.
(3) Tadhkirat al-Huffaz reads: “habr” (learned scholar).
(4) Tadhkirat al-Huffaz adds: “and Ibn Khalid.”
(5) The correct spelling is with jim and ra, as the author himself vocalises it in al-Mushtabih, p. 247; the manuscript has wrongly read it as Hamza with ha and za. For his biography, see Ghaya al-Nihaya, no. 2747.