Muḥammad al-Khuwwārī; from Zāhir ibn Ṭāhir; from the ḥāfiẓ (hadith master) ʿAbd al-Ghāfir ibn Ismāʿīl; from Sahl ibn Ibrāhīm; from al-Faḍl al-Abīwardī; from Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad ibn Ṣāʿid; from his own father; and from several others.

Those who narrated from him included Badal al-Tibrīzī, Najm al-Dīn Abū al-Janāb al-Khaywaqī, Abū Rashīd al-Ghazzāl, Ismāʿīl ibn Ẓafar, his son al-Qāsim ibn Abī Saʿd al-Saffār, and many more.

By way of written licence (ijāza) his transmissions were carried by Shaykh Shams al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Abī ʿUmar, Ibn al-Bukhārī, and a number of others.

He was counted among the foremost, firmly grounded imāms and reliable scholars.

Among the works he personally auditioned were: Sunan al-Dāraquṭnī—with one well-known lacuna—from Abū al-Qāsim Faḍl ibn Muḥammad al-Abīwardī, who had heard it from Abū Manṣūr al-Nawqānī, who in turn had heard it from the author; al-Sunan al-Kabīr, which he received from Zāhir ibn Ṭāhir; Sunan Abī Dāwūd, which he obtained from ʿAbd al-Ghāfir, who said, “Naṣr ibn ʿAlī al-Hākimī informed us”; as well as both the Sunan and the Āthār collections, which he heard from ʿAbd al-Jabbār.

Abū al-ʿAlāʾ al-Faraḍī informed me, saying: “Majd al-Dīn Abū Saʿd ibn al-Saffār is an Imām, a scholar of uṣūl, and a trustworthy jurist. He studied under his father, his paternal aunt ʿĀʾishah, his grandmother Durdānah—the sister of ʿAbd al-Ghāfir—, Hibat Allāh al-Sayyidī, Sahl ibn Ibrāhīm al-Masjidī, and several others.”

Al-Mundhirī (1) said: “He died on the seventeenth of Ramaḍān (2), in the year 600 AH.”