Aḥmad ibn ʿAbd Allāh al-ʿIjlī said, “Al-Shaʿbī heard from forty-eight Companions of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ. He would hardly ever transmit a mursal report unless it was sound.”
ʿAqīl ibn Yaḥyā narrated: Abū Dāwūd told us, from Shuʿbah, from Manṣūr al-Ghudānī, from al-Shaʿbī, who said, “I met five hundred Companions—or even more—and they all used to say: ‘Abū Bakr, ʿUmar, ʿUthmān, and ʿAlī.’ (1)”
As for ʿAmr ibn Marzūq, he related the same report from Shuʿbah, but in his version they said: “ʿAlī, Ṭalḥah, and al-Zubayr are in Paradise.” (2)
Ibn Fuḍayl, from Ibn Shubruma, said: I heard al-Shaʿbī declare, “Up to this very day I have never put black on white, no one has ever related a report to me without my committing it to memory, nor have I ever wished him to repeat it.” (3)
This is the wording we heard in the Musnad of al-Dārimī.
Mālik ibn Ismāʿīl informed us; Ibn Fuḍayl informed us: it is as though al-Shaʿbī is addressing you personally with this, which shows that he was illiterate—he neither wrote nor read.
Al-Fasawī, in his Taʾrīkh (4), reported: al-Ḥumaydī told us, Sufyān told us, Ibn Shubruma told us, “I heard al-Shaʿbī say, ‘In the past twenty years I have not heard anyone relate a ḥadīth without my knowing it better than he does; yet I have forgotten so much knowledge that, had a man preserved it, he would have been considered a scholar.’”
Nūḥ ibn Qays, from Yūnus ibn Muslim, from Wādiʿ al-Rāsibī, from al-Shaʿbī