Abū al-ʿAlāʾ Ḥasan ibn Aḥmad al-Hamadhānī al-ʿAṭṭār, the Qur’an reciter and author of several works—an eminent imām.

Abū al-Faraj ʿAbd al-Khāliq ibn Aḥmad al-Yūsufī, a hadith scholar. He studied under Abū Naṣr al-Zaynabī, ʿĀṣim ibn al-Ḥasan, and many others. He died in 548 AH at the age of eighty-four.

Abū al-Qāsim Naṣr ibn Naṣr al-ʿUkbarī, the preacher; he heard hadith from Abū al-Qāsim ibn al-Busrī.

I read a lengthy biography of al-Nishtabri in the handwriting of Abū al-Fatḥ the ḥāfiẓ, in which he writes:

“ʿAbd al-Khāliq ibn Anjab ibn al-Muʿammar ibn Ḥasan ibn ʿUbayd Allāh ibn Yūsuf ibn Rūḥayn al-Nishtabri—born in the village of Nishtabr near Shahrawān. Ibn Masdī said of him: ‘A shaykh among the leading authorities in this field, to whom people travelled from distant lands; a man of memorization and precision.’

He attended scholarly gatherings in many places and had copious auditions, with wide-ranging lines of transmission. I have not found any record of his hearing before the year “ten of the eighties” (590 AH). He possessed ijāzāt (formal licenses to transmit) from a group of shaykhs from whom no one else narrated: Asʿad ibn ʿAbd al-Wāḥid ibn al-Qushayrī, Wajīh al-Shahhāmī, al-Karūkhī, and Ibn al-Jawāliqī, and by the year forty there was no one left on earth who reported from them except him.

The hadith masters differed regarding this ijāza. Some withheld judgment, saying that tadlīs (a concealed attribution) had been practiced on him and he accepted it in good faith; others maintained that it is sound. Suspicion arose chiefly because of the uncertainty surrounding his birth date, for most reports state that it was about a year before 540 AH. He resided for a time in Dunaysir and later in Mardin.

Abū al-Fatḥ said: ‘The amir Ibn al-Tītī produced ʿAbd al-Khāliq’s ijāza for us. He copied it, and al-Karūkhī’s own handwriting appears on the sheet containing the petition, which reads: “Should the masters deem it proper to grant authorization to ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz ibn ʿAbd Allāh al-Tūnsī, to al-Anjab ibn al-Muʿammar ibn al-Ḥasan, and to his two sons, Yaḥyā and ʿAbd al-Khāliq, for everything that is sound and judged sound by them from all that….”’