other than that?”

I replied, “Keep walking; your need is in Allah’s hand alone.” He then went about the mosque repeating, “The moment I accompanied Sulaymān I became nothing but a servant boy.”

Ibn Idrīs related: Al-Aʿmash was once asked about a ḥadīth but refused to narrate it. They kept at him until they drew it out, and when he finally reported it he struck a comparison, saying:

“A cotton-dealer brought some silver coins to a money-changer so that he might inspect them. When the money-changer weighed them he found them short by seventy, whereupon he recited:

I marvel greatly at a wicked wolf
That snatched a prey from a lion of the wild;
With his very paw he skimmed off seventy of them,
Choosing them from the solid, black ones. (1)
If I can be deceived, others too may be duped—
Even the seasoned bird is sometimes seized from the open sky.”

Nuʿaym ibn Ḥammād reported: Ibn ʿUyaynah said, “Had you seen al-Aʿmash—clad in a coarse fur cloak and two (I think he said: two thick) leather boots—you would have taken him for a beggar.”

Al-Aʿmash once remarked, “Were it not for the Quran and the knowledge I possess, I would have been just another grocer in Kufa.”

ʿAlī ibn Aḥmad informed us in his book; ʿUmar ibn Muḥammad informed us; ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Anmāṭī informed us; ʿAbd Allāh ibn Muḥammad informed us; ʿUbayd Allāh ibn Ḥabābah narrated to us; Abū l-Qāsim al-Baghawī narrated to us; Maḥmūd ibn Ghailān narrated to us; al-Faḍl ibn Mūsā narrated to us; al-Aʿmash said:

“I entered upon Mujāhid, and when I left him one of his companions followed me and said, ‘I heard Mujāhid say, “If I had the strength, I would keep going to this man”—meaning al-Aʿmash.’”

Through the same chain reaching al-Baghawī, Abū Saʿīd narrated to me; Ḥumayd ibn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Ruʾāsī narrated to us; I heard al-Aʿmash say, “Take care—do not scatter these dinars over the churches.”