so I cried out, “Do you fabricate a lie, Abū al-Zubayr, against a Muslim man?”
He answered, “He angered me.”
I retorted, “And because someone angers you, you invent a charge against him? I will never transmit anything from you again.”
After that Shuʿbah would say, “I keep 400 hadith of Abū al-Zubayr locked inside my chest.”
As for Abū ʿUmar al-Ḥawḍī, he related that people once asked Shuʿbah, “Why did you abandon Abū al-Zubayr?” He replied, “I saw him perform the prayer poorly, so I stopped narrating from him.”
ʿUmar ibn ʿĪsā ibn Yūnus reported from his father that Shuʿbah said to him, “If you were to see Abū al-Zubayr, you would think him a policeman carrying a club.” I asked, “What has Abū al-Zubayr ever done to you?”
Saʿīd ibn Abī Maryam narrated: al-Layth told us, “When I arrived in Mecca I went to Abū al-Zubayr. He handed me two notebooks, and I left with them. Then I said to myself, ‘Why not go back and ask him, “Did you hear all of this directly from Jābir?”’ So I returned and questioned him. He answered, ‘Some of it I heard from him, and some of it I was told on his authority.’ I said, ‘Mark for me what you actually heard.’ So he marked it out for me on the copy I had.”
Nuʿaym ibn Ḥammād reported that Sufyān said, “A man came to Abū al-Zubayr carrying the book of Sulaymān al-Yashkurī. The man would question him, and Abū al-Zubayr would relate part of the hadith, then say, ‘Look how it is written in your book.’ The man would read out what the book contained, and Abū al-Zubayr would narrate it exactly as found there.”
Abū Muslim al-Mustaʿmilī said: Sufyān related to us, “I went to Abū al-Zubayr with another man. Whenever we asked him about a hadith and he hesitated, he would say, ‘Check the scroll to see how it is written.’”
Muḥammad ibn Yaḥyā al-ʿAdanī transmitted from Ibn ʿUyaynah: “Whenever Abū al-Zubayr and ʿAmr ibn Dīnār disagreed over a narration from Jābir, Abū al-Zubayr always added something more.”
Muḥammad ibn ʿUthmān al-ʿAbsī said, “I asked ʿAlī ibn al-Madīnī about Abū al-Zubayr, and he replied, ‘Reliable, firmly grounded.’”