“A man has sworn, staking the divorce of his wife, that you have memorised one hundred thousand hadiths.” ʿAbd al-Ghanī replied, “Had he named an even larger number, he would still have spoken the truth!”

I saw the ḥāfiẓ on the pulpit more than once: people would say to him, “Recite for us without a book,” and he would recite hadiths with their chains of transmission straight from memory.

I heard his son ʿAbd al-Raḥmān say: “I heard one of our family relate that the ḥāfiẓ was asked, ‘Why do you not read without a book?’ He answered, ‘I fear becoming self-admiring.’”

I also heard my maternal uncle Abū ʿUmar (1)—or it may have been my father—say: “King Nūr al-Dīn ibn Zankī used to come to us while we were listening to hadith. Whenever the reader found something problematic, the ḥāfiẓ ʿAbd al-Ghanī would supply it. Later he travelled to al-Silafī; when Nūr al-Dīn visited again he asked, ‘Where is that young man?’ We replied, ‘He has departed.’”

I heard ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz ibn ʿAbd al-Malik al-Shaybānī say: “I heard al-Tāj al-Kindī declare, ‘Since al-Dāraqutnī there has been no one like the ḥāfiẓ ʿAbd al-Ghanī.’”

I also heard Abū al-Thanāʾ Maḥmūd ibn Hammām say: “I heard al-Kindī remark, ‘The ḥāfiẓ never saw anyone the like of himself.’”

I have examined, in the handwriting of Abū Mūsā al-Madīnī, the copy of Tabyīn al-Iṣāba that ʿAbd al-Ghanī dictated—and which was heard by Abū Mūsā, the ḥāfiẓ Abū Saʿd al-Ṣāʿigh, and Abū al-ʿAbbās the Turk—where he wrote:

“Abū Mūsā—may Allah pardon him—says: ‘Few who have come to us understand this discipline as thoroughly as the shaykh, the Imām, Ḍiyāʾ al-Dīn Abū Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Maqdisī. He has been divinely aided in clarifying these slips, and had al-Dāraqutnī and the like been alive, they would have approved his work. In our time scarcely anyone comprehends what he has grasped. May Allah increase him in knowledge and in success.’”