ʿAbd Allah, son of al-Yatīm, the Andalusian, an Ansari known as al-Andarashī, and also called Ibn al-Balansī.
He was born in 544 AH.
He studied with: Abū al-Ḥasan ibn Hudhayl and Ibn al-Niʿmah in Valencia; Abū Marwān ibn Quzmān in Lisbon; Abū Isḥāq ibn Qurqūl in Málaga; Ibn Ḥubaysh in Murcia; Abū al-Qāsim Ibn Bashkuwāl in Córdoba; Abū al-Ḥasan ibn Ḥunayn in Fez; ʿAbd al-Khāliq the ḥāfiẓ in Béjaïa; al-Silafī at the frontier port (Alexandria); ʿUthmān ibn Faraj in Egypt; Shahdah the Scribe in Baghdad; Abū al-Faḍl al-Khaṭīb in Mosul; Ibn ʿAsākir in Damascus; and al-Mayānashī in Mecca. He compiled and transmitted collections with a certain leniency in them.
Ibn Masdī said: “His literary composition was unsound, hence his many slips. Abū al-Rabīʿ al-Kalāʿī tracked his errors. His father—known as ‘the Ustādh’—took him round in search of knowledge and, in 552 AH, had him listen to a group of scholars whose narrations became unique to him. Yet he never became a ḥāfiẓ and was voracious in relating fabricated reports.”
Ibn Masdī also said: “I heard a great deal from him, and in his own handwriting I saw the chain of transmission for Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī: from Abū al-Ṭāhir al-Silafī, from Ibn al-Baṭr, from Ibn al-Bayyiʿ, from al-Maḥāmilī, from al-Bukhārī.”
I (al-Dhahabī) say: None of these—meaning al-Silafī and his shaykh—possess so elevated a chain except for a single ḥadith that appears in the Duʿāʾ section of al-Maḥāmilī, traced back to al-Bukhārī.
A number of scholars declared al-Andarashī reliable and transmitted from him, but he was not precise, and he later held the post of preacher in Almería.