ʿUmar ibn Muḥammad al-ʿUlami said, “I looked for Ibn Rifāʿah’s audition record of al-Khilaʿī’s Fawāʾid, which consisted of 20 fascicles in his keeping. Other than the first and the sixth fascicles I found no evidence of his hearing; of the twelfth he had heard only a portion; and as for the twentieth fascicle, I never located the original at all—only a duplicate that the shaykh possessed.”

I say: I copied this from the handwriting of Ibn Sāmah, who had taken it from ʿAlī ibn ʿAbd al-Kāfī, from Abū al-Ḥasan al-Ḥiṣnī. The latter said, “I found it written in the hand of al-Rashīd al-ʿAṭṭār, copied from the original.” Beneath al-ʿUlami’s note Ibn al-Anmāṭī wrote: “He truly sought and strove, yet others found what he did not.”

Ibn Rifāʿah was in fact truthful when he reported his auditions, for he served al-Khilaʿī with unwavering devotion and was the most constant of men in his company. More than one person told me that he himself said, “From the moment I attached myself to al-Khilaʿī, I was absent from him only one day—when I attended al-Ḥabbāl’s gathering…,” after which he related the story and added, “and I never missed a single reading made before him until he died.”

Ibn al-Anmāṭī said: Our shaykh Ḥammād al-Ḥarrānī produced a document in his own handwriting and narrated to me:

“I found, on the back of the second fascicle of the ḥadīths transmitted by al-Zaʿfarānī, a register of books heard by our shaykh ʿAbd Allāh ibn Ghudayr al-Saʿdī. The copy belonged to al-Masʿūdī. He had heard the entire Sunan of Abū Dāwūd from al-Khilaʿī, before Muḥammad al-Rūḥānī, with the reading of Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥusayn ibn Muḥammad al-Ṣadafī and of the qāḍī’s servant Abū(1) Muḥammad ʿAbd Allāh ibn Rifāʿah ibn Ghudayr.

They also heard from him the Sīrah—specifically Ibn Hishām’s abridgement—the complete twenty-fascicle Fawāʾid of al-Khilaʿī, the entire corpus of al-Zaʿfarānī’s ḥadīths, the ḥadīths of Yūnus, the Muʿjam of Ibn al-Aʿrābī, and other fawāʾid, all read by the aforesaid reciter and others during the years 488 and 489 AH, most of it in the Qarāfah cemetery.”