He could, in fact, have heard hadith from Jābir, Sahl ibn Saʿd, Anas, and Saʿīd ibn al-Musayyib, yet no transmission from any of them ever came his way.
He did see Ibn ʿUmar and preserved from him the report that Ibn ʿUmar prayed for him and wiped his head.
Those who narrated on his authority include Shuʿbah, Mālik, al-Thawrī, and many others.
Al-Bukhārī caught up with the last of his students, such as ʿUbayd Allah ibn Mūsā.
Wuhayb said, “Hishām ibn ʿUrwah visited us, and he was on a par with al-Ḥasan and Ibn Sīrīn.”
Ibn Saʿd said, “He was trustworthy, firmly established, prolific in hadith, an authoritative proof.”
Abū Ḥātim al-Rāzī said, “Reliable—an imam in hadith.”
ʿAlī ibn al-Madīnī said, “He has roughly four hundred hadiths.”
Yaḥyā ibn Maʿīn and several others stated, “Trustworthy.”
Yaʿqūb ibn Shaybah said, “Hishām is reliable; nothing was found objectionable in his narrations until after he went to Iraq. There he became expansive in transmitting and sent on his father’s authority items he had actually heard from someone other than his father about his father.”
ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Khirāsh said, “It reached me that Mālik disliked Hishām ibn ʿUrwah’s narrations to the Iraqis and was not pleased with him.”
He then added, “Hishām came to Kūfa three times. On the first visit he would say, ‘My father narrated to me, saying: I heard ʿĀʾishah….’ On the second he would say, ‘My father informed me, from ʿĀʾishah.’ On the third, he would simply say, ‘My father, from ʿĀʾishah,’ meaning that he narrated from his father in a mursal (unconnected) form.”
I say: The man is an authority, absolutely; no weight should be given to what the ḥadith master Abū al-Ḥasan ibn al-Qaṭṭān (1) asserted—that he and Suhayl ibn Abī Ṣāliḥ became confused and their memories changed—for a ḥadith scholar’s retention may indeed weaken when he grows old and the sharpness of his mind declines; in his old age he is not as he was in his