breadth, and jurists who deliver fatwas have never ceased to disagree—this one deems a point permissible, that one deems it prohibited. A single issue may descend upon one of them like a mountain, but once its gate is opened to him he exclaims, “How easy this is!”

Yaʿqūb ibn Kāsib said: Some scholars narrated to us, saying, “I heard a herald call out in the Sacred Mosque during the days of Marwān: ‘No one may give a ruling to the pilgrims in the Mosque except Yaḥyā ibn Saʿīd, ʿUbayd Allah ibn ʿUmar, and Mālik ibn Anas.’”

Ibn Wahb reported from Mālik, from Yaḥyā, who said: “I said to Sālim ibn ʿAbd Allah, ‘Did you hear this from Ibn ʿUmar?’ He replied, ‘Only once? Yes—more than a hundred times.’”

With this same chain, from Yaḥyā, who said: “I would rather have written down everything I ever heard than possess an amount equal to all my wealth.”

Abū Saʿīd al-Ḥanafī said: I heard Yazīd ibn Hārūn say, “I had memorized three thousand hadiths on the authority of Yaḥyā ibn Saʿīd. Then I fell ill and forgot half of them.” A young man in the gathering remarked, “Take it easy—if only you had fallen ill a second time and forgotten them all, we would be rid of you!” Al-Ḥākim related this report, and I do not know who al-Ḥanafī is.

Yaḥyā ibn Saʿīd al-Qaṭṭān used to rank Yaḥyā ibn Saʿīd al-Anṣārī above al-Zuhrī, because he had met the former but not the latter.

Aḥmad al-ʿIjlī said: “Yaḥyā ibn Saʿīd was a righteous man, a jurist, trustworthy.”

Al-Thawrī said: “He was a ḥāfiẓ,” i.e., possessed an extraordinary memory.

Ibn ʿUyaynah said: “The hadith scholars of the Ḥijāz are Ibn Shihāb, Yaḥyā ibn Saʿīd, and Ibn Jurayj.”

Abū ʿUways narrated from Yaḥyā ibn Saʿīd, who said: “I accompanied Anas ibn Mālik to Syria.”

Muḥammad ibn Salām al-Jumaḥī related: “Yaḥyā ibn Saʿīd was light-”