Ibn Saʿd reported: “Muḥammad ibn ʿUmar informed us; Nāfiʿ ibn Abī Nuʿaym, Ismāʿīl ibn Ibrāhīm ibn ʿUqbah, and Ibn Abī Farwah narrated to me, saying:

‘The notebook in which Nāfiʿ had written what he heard from Ibn ʿUmar was a single parchment sheet. We would read it back to him, and he would ask, “Abū ʿAbd Allāh, are you going to say, ‘Nāfiʿ has narrated to us’?”—and we would reply, “Yes.”’

Al-Aṣmaʿī transmits, through Nāfiʿ ibn Abī Nuʿaym, from Nāfiʿ, that someone once said to him, ‘They have committed your knowledge to writing.’ He exclaimed, ‘Written it down?!’ When told, ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘Then let them bring it so that I may correct it.’

ʿAbd al-Majīd ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz ibn Abī Rawwād narrates—on the authority of his father—from Nāfiʿ that, when death approached him, he wept. He was asked, ‘What makes you weep?’ He answered, ‘I have remembered Saʿd (1) and the constriction of the grave.’

Ḥammād ibn Zayd and several others said that Nāfiʿ died in 117 AH. Al-Haytham ibn ʿAdī and Abū ʿUmar al-Ḍarīr diverged from this and held that he died in 120 AH.

Ismāʿīl ibn Umayyah said, ‘We used to correct Nāfiʿ’s laḥn (grammatical slips), but he would refuse and say, “No—only in the very wording I heard.”’

Scholars differ over Nāfiʿ’s ethnic origin: some say he was Berber; others, from Naysābūr; still others, Daylamite, Ṭālaqānī, or Kabuli. The most plausible view is that, broadly speaking, he was of Persian lineage.

Al-Nasāʾī said, ‘The most reliable of Nāfiʿ’s students are: Mālik, then Ayyūb, then ʿUbayd Allāh, then Yaḥyā ibn Saʿīd, then Ibn ʿAwn, then Ṣāliḥ ibn Kaysān, then Mūsā ibn ʿUqbah, then Ibn…’