about a certain man who asked me to intercede concerning the property of an orphan that was to be delivered to him so that he might take it into his own charge. I conveyed the request, and he said, “Do you know the man?” I replied, “Yes.” He said, “Then hand it over to him.”

Rajaʾ ibn Salamah, on the authority of Ibn ʿAwn, from Ibn Sīrīn—when someone asked him about al-Ḥasan, “What was it that the Qadarites used to attribute to him?”—answered, “They would come to the shaykh with ambiguous words; had they explained them fully, he would have disapproved.” (1)

Ibn Abī ʿArūbah said: I asked Matar al-Warraq about the permissibility of selling Qur’an codices. He replied, “The two great scholars of the ummah—or, if you wish, its leading jurists—saw no harm in it: al-Ḥasan and al-Shaʿbī.” (2)

Ibn Shawdhub, reporting from Matar, said: “We entered upon al-Ḥasan to visit him during an illness, and there was nothing in the house—no mattress, no carpet, no cushion, and no mat—nothing but a plaited bed on which he was lying.” (3)

ʿAbd al-Razzāq ibn Hammām, on the authority of his father, said: “Wahb was appointed judge in the time of ʿUmar ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz, yet his judgment met with no praise. I mentioned this to Maʿmar, who smiled and said, ‘Al-Ḥasan was likewise made judge under ʿUmar ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz, and his judgment was no better regarded.’” (4)

Abū Saʿīd ibn al-Aʿrābī said: “A group from among these people used to sit with al-Ḥasan. When he spoke in detail about certain matters, the Qadarites ascribed to him the doctrine of jabr (absolute compulsion); when he spoke about human acquisition, the people of the sunnah ascribed to him the doctrine of qadar. All of that stemmed from his subtlety and the differing capacities of those who listened.”