in any matter—while he was then the governor of Medina—until he had first consulted Saʿīd ibn al-Musayyib. He would send someone to ask him; Saʿīd would invite the envoy, and so he would come.
ʿUmar would say to him, “The messenger made a mistake; we only sent him so that he might ask you while you remained in your own gathering-place.”
ʿUmar also used to say, “There was no scholar in Medina but that he himself came to me with what he knew, whereas what Saʿīd ibn al-Musayyib possessed was brought to me instead.”⦗1⦘

Salām ibn Miskīn narrated: ʿImrān ibn ʿAbdullāh al-Khuzāʿī told me, “Saʿīd ibn al-Musayyib once asked about my lineage, so I traced it for him. He then said, ‘Your father sat with me during the caliphate of Muʿāwiyah and asked me questions.’”
Salām added that ʿImrān used to say, “By Allah, I never saw anything pass through his ear without his heart retaining it”—meaning Ibn al-Musayyib—“and I believe that Saʿīd valued his own life, for the sake of Allah, less than the life of a fly.”⦗2⦘

Jaʿfar ibn Burqān related: Maymūn ibn Mihrān told us, “It has reached me that for forty years Saʿīd ibn al-Musayyib never entered the mosque to find that the people had already finished the prayer.”

ʿAffān reported: Ḥammād ibn Salamah narrated to us, from ʿAlī ibn Zayd: “I said to Saʿīd ibn al-Musayyib, ‘Your people claim that the only thing keeping you from making Hajj is that you vowed before Allah that, should you see the Kaʿbah, you would pray against Ibn Marwān.’
He replied, ‘I never did that. I do not perform a single prayer without asking Allah against them. I have, in fact, performed the Hajj and the ʿumrah some twenty-odd times, yet only one Hajj and one ʿumrah are obligatory upon me. I see some of your people go into debt in order to make Hajj and ʿumrah, then they die and their debts remain unpaid. One Friday prayer is dearer to me than a voluntary Hajj or ʿumrah.’”

I conveyed this to al-Ḥasan, and he said, “He has said nothing of weight. If matters were as he claims, the Companions of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ would never have performed Hajj or ʿumrah.”⦗3⦘