With this same chain: Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn ʿIsa narrated to us; al-Walid narrated to us; I heard Shuʿbah say, “Ayyub—the master of the jurists—narrated to me.”

With this same chain: ʿAli ibn Muslim narrated to us; Abu Dawud narrated to us, from Shuʿbah, who said, “I have never seen anyone comparable to Ayyub, Yunus, and Ibn ʿAwn.”

And Sufyan al-Thawri said, “In Basra I never saw the like of four men …,” and he began with Ayyub.

Abu ʿAwanah said, “I have mixed with people, yet I have never seen the like of these men: Ayyub, Yunus, and Ibn ʿAwn.”

With this same chain: ʿAli ibn Muslim narrated to us; Hibban, the client of the Umayyads, narrated to me; I heard Salam ibn Abi Mutiʿ say, “We never outstripped the people of the great towns in any age except in the time of Ayyub, Yunus, and Ibn ʿAwn; there were no men on earth like them.”

With this same chain: Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Mawsili narrated to us; Hammad ibn Zayd narrated to us: “Ayyub would not pause at any verse except that, when he came to: ‘Indeed Allah and His angels send blessings upon the Prophet’ (Al-Ahzab, 33:56), he would fall silent for a moment.”

Ahmad likewise narrated to us; Hammad narrated to us, from Ayyub, who said, “I found the people here, and their speech was: ‘If it has been decreed and if it has been pre-ordained.’”

He used to say, “Let a man fear Allah; and if he embraces asceticism, let him not make his asceticism a torment for others. It is better for a man to conceal his renunciation than to flaunt it.”

Ayyub was one of those who concealed their asceticism. We entered upon him and found him lying on a red mattress with a five-fold pattern. I lifted it—or one of our companions did—and there was a rough mat stuffed with palm-fiber beneath it.

With this same chain: ʿAli ibn Muslim narrated to us; Abu Dawud narrated to us, who said: Shuʿbah said, “I never made an appointment with Ayyub without his saying, as he parted from me, ‘There is no appointment between you and me.’ Yet whenever I came, I found he had arrived before me.”

With this same chain: Ishaq ibn Ibrahim al-Marwazi narrated to us; al-Nadr ibn Shumayl narrated to us; he told me