Ibn Nuqta said, “I wrote down ḥadith from him; he was reliable, possessed a vast memory, and was a righteous man.

Regarding the nisba ‘al-Zuhri,’ the first consonant is vocalised with a fatḥa.”

Al-Mundhiri (1) remarked: “Ibn al-Rūmiyya attended sessions in Baghdad, and I met him in Egypt after his return. There he related a number of ḥadith from memory, but I did not have the chance to hear directly from him. He also compiled several collections.”

I add: he wrote a book entitled al-Tadhkira on the scholars from whom he learnt, and another work, al-Muʿallim bimā Zāda al-Bukhārī ʿalā Muslim.

He died suddenly at the end of Rabīʿ al-Awwal in 637 AH, and elegiac poems were composed in his honour.

41 – al-Khujandī, Abū Saʿd Thābit ibn Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad *

The venerable shaykh, the distinguished scholar, the imām and jurist ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Abū Saʿd Thābit ibn Muḥammad ibn Abī Bakr Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad ibn al-Khujandī al-Iṣbahānī, later a resident of Shiraz.

He was born in 548 AH.

He heard the Ṣaḥīḥ of al-Bukhārī from Abū al-Waqt al-Sijzī in person during the fourth public reading in 551 AH.

He also studied under Abū al-Faḍl Maḥmūd ibn Muḥammad al-Shahhām, and happened to be in Isfahan when the unbelieving Mongols overran it in 632 AH.