The people took him to task for that, whereupon he said,
“What is it that you criticise me for? I kept the company of ʿAṭāʾ for twenty years; more than once a man would relate something to me from him that I myself had not heard.”

Al-ʿAyshī then remarked, “That day Ibn Jurayj referred to Muḥammad ibn Jaʿfar as ‘Ghundar’; the people of the Ḥijāz use the word ghundar for a quarrelsome fellow.”

Ibn Maʿīn said, “Ibn Jurayj never met Wahb ibn Munabbih.”

Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal said, “He did not meet ʿAmr ibn Shuʿayb with regard to the hadith on paying zakāt from an orphan’s property, nor did he meet Abū al-Zinād.”

I say: The man himself is trustworthy and a ḥāfiẓ, yet he practised tadlīs by employing the vague formula ‘from (ʿan).’

He was also a man of devotion and night prayer, and he continued seeking knowledge until he was old and grey-haired. Anyone who claims that he lived beyond one hundred is mistaken; he did not exceed eighty, and he was still a young man during the years he attended ʿAṭāʾ.

After the Companions, the senior scholars of the Sacred Precinct were ʿAṭāʾ and Mujāhid; they were followed by Qays ibn Saʿd and Ibn Jurayj, and thereafter Ibn Jurayj became the sole leading authority. He compiled the knowledge, people transmitted from him, Muslim ibn Khālid al-Zanjī studied jurisprudence under him, and Imam Abū ʿAbd Allāh al-Shāfiʿī in turn studied under al-Zanjī. Al-Shāfiʿī was thoroughly familiar with the learning of Ibn Jurayj, alert to its subtleties, as well as to the learning of Sufyān ibn ʿUyaynah.

The narrations of Ibn Jurayj are abundant in the Six Books, in Aḥmad’s Musnad, in al-Ṭabarānī’s al-Muʿjam al-Kabīr, and in many smaller individual compilations (ajzāʾ).

ʿAbd al-Razzāq said, “Whenever I looked at Ibn Jurayj, I knew that he feared Allah.”

Ibn Jurayj said, “I did not hear directly from al-Zuhrī; he simply handed me a booklet, I copied it, and he granted me permission for it.”

Yahyā ibn Maʿīn said, “The client-patron affiliation (walāʾ) of Ibn Jurayj was with the family of Khālid ibn Asīd of the Umayyads.”

Yahyā ibn Saʿīd said, “Ibn Jurayj heard from Mujāhid the report: (‘Then divorce them in …’).”