However, his principal concern in the field of audition was ḥadīth. Al-Dhahabī listened to hundreds of full works and individual fascicles of ḥadīth throughout his lifelong quest for knowledge. Anyone who pores over the catalogues of his teachers and his own writings with patience and care will see this for himself. Moreover, those works and fascicles are by no means the sum total of what he heard from his shaykhs; the vast multitude of noble Prophetic reports he absorbed is represented in his teachers’ indexes only by a handful of illustrative examples.

Furthermore, he would often hear the same book or fascicle from more than one teacher, in some cases reaching dozens of auditions. By way of illustration: he heard “Juzʾ al-Ḥasan ibn ʿArafah,” one of the celebrated ḥadīth fascicles, more than forty times from over forty teachers (1); he heard the “Nuskhat Abī Mushir,” compiled by ʿAbd al-Aʿlā ibn Mushir, d. 218 AH (2), on more than twelve occasions (3); and he heard “Juzʾ Ibn Fīl” (4) by Abū Ṭāhir al-Ḥasan ibn Aḥmad ibn Fīl al-Bālisī from upwards of ten shaykhs (5).

I must add that al-Dhahabī did not take pains to list his auditions in exhaustive detail within his Muʿjam of shaykhs, unlike Ibn Ḥajar, for example, who in his al-Muʿjam al-Mufahras arranged