ʿUmar ibn ʿAlī al-Qurashī said: “I began reading Sunan Ibn Mājah to Abū Zurʿah when he came to us on pilgrimage. He told us, ‘This book reached me by direct audition from Abū Manṣūr al-Muqawwimī. My audition was taken from a copy I own, written in my father’s hand, and on that copy is also recorded the audition of Ismāʿīl al-Karmānī. He later asked me for the volume, and I handed it over to him more than thirty years ago.’

Al-Qurashī continued: “We verified that he possessed an ijāzah from al-Muqawwimī, so the book was read to him on the basis of that authorization, if not by direct hearing.”

I (the author) say: He heard from al-Muqawwimī the work Kitāb Faḍāʾil al-Qurʾān (The Merits of the Qur’an) by Abū ʿUbayd in Shaʿbān of the year 484 AH; this means his audition took place in person when he was four years old. Through him we also received the Musnad of al-Shāfiʿī, al-Mujtabā (the abridged Sunan of al-Nasāʾī), Sunan Ibn Mājah, and various individual fascicles.

Al-Samʿānī, in his Dhayl, called him Dāwūd, which is an error; it has also been said that his name was al-Faḍl. Al-Samʿānī further recorded that he was born in the year 480 AH.

Ibn al-Najjār said: “His father took Abū Zurʿah Ṭāhir on extensive journeys and had him listen to … until he remarked: His father was a merchant who understood nothing of scholarship, though he was a righteous shaykh. He carried all of his own father’s books—every one of them in his father’s handwriting—to the ḥāfiẓ Abū al-ʿAlāʾ al-ʿAṭṭār, endowed them as a waqf, and handed them over to him. I heard someone say they filled thirty large sacks; I saw most of them in Abū al-ʿAlāʾ’s library.”

It is also said that Abū Zurʿah performed the pilgrimage twenty times.

Abū ʿAbd Allāh al-Dubaythī said: “He died in Rabīʿ al-Ākhir of the year 566 AH in Hamadhān,” and then added, “and he possessed no real knowledge.”