Al-Awzāʿī likewise transmitted from him, saying, “Those who imagine themselves safest from ostentation are in fact the ones nearest to it.”

Rajāʾ ibn Abī Salamah said, “I heard ʿAbdah remark, ‘I would love it if my whole relationship with the people of this age were that they never asked me about anything and I never asked them, for they compete in multiplying questions just as the people of silver compete in multiplying their coins.’ ”

He died around the year 127 AH.

98 – Yūnus ibn Maysarah ibn Ḥalbas al-Jublānī (D, T, Q)
Abū ʿUbayd—also called Abū Ḥalbas al-Jublānī—the blind scholar of Damascus, and the brother of Ayyūb and Yazīd.

He lived to a great age and related hadith from Muʿāwiyah, ʿAbd Allah ibn ʿAmr, Wāthilah ibn al-Asqaʿ, Ibn ʿUmar, Abū Muslim al-Khawlānī, al-Ṣunābihī, and several others.

Those who narrated from him include ʿAmr ibn Wāqid, Marwān ibn Janāḥ, al-Awzāʿī, Saʿīd ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz, and others.

Abū ʿUbayd and Abū Ḥassān al-Ziyādī said: “He reached one hundred and twenty years of age. He used to teach the Qur’an in the Great Mosque and had beneficial words on asceticism and spiritual knowledge.”

He was declared trustworthy by al-ʿIjli and al-Dāraquṭnī.

He is the one who said, “If you busy yourself with what does not concern you, what does concern you will busy itself with you.”

ʿAmr ibn Wāqid reported: “Yūnus told us, ‘I heard Muʿāwiyah on the pulpit…,’ ” and he mentioned a hadith.

Al-Haytham ibn ʿImrān said: “I was sitting with Ibn Ḥalbas, and at sunset he would supplicate, ‘O Allah, grant us martyrdom in Your cause.’ I used to say, ‘How could he attain that when he is blind?’ Yet when the al-Musawwada—the black-clad forces—entered Damascus, he was killed. I was later informed that the two men who killed him wept when they learned of his righteousness. That occurred in the year 132 AH.”