and he narrated from ʿIkrima, ʿAṭāʾ, al-Ḥakam, Nāfiʿ, Makḥūl, Jabalah ibn Suḥaym, al-Zuhrī, Qatādah, al-Qāsim ibn Abī Bazzah, ʿAmr ibn Shuʿayb, Ibn al-Munkadir, Zayd ibn Jubayr al-Ṭāʾī, ʿAṭiyyah al-ʿAwfī, al-Minhāl ibn ʿAmr, Abū Maṭar, Riyāḥ ibn ʿAbīdah, Abū Isḥāq, Simāk, ʿAwn ibn Abī Juḥayfah, and many others besides.

He was an ocean of knowledge, though some criticism was directed at him for a trace of baʾw (1), for his practice of tadlīs (concealing intermediaries in the chain), and for a slight shortcoming in his memory; still, he was never discarded as a narrator.

Those who reported from him include Manṣūr ibn al-Muʿtamir—who was actually one of his teachers—Qays ibn Saʿd, Ibn Isḥāq, and Shuʿbah—his contemporaries—the two Ḥammāds, al-Thawrī, Sharīk, Ziyād al-Bakkāʾī, ʿAbbād ibn al-ʿAwwām, al-Muḥāribī, Hushaym, Muʿtamir, Ghundar, Yazīd ibn Hārūn, ʿAbd Allāh ibn Numayr, and a great many others.

Sufyān ibn ʿUyaynah said, “I heard Ibn Abī Najīḥ remark, ‘No one like him has come to us from among you’—meaning Ḥajjāj ibn Arṭāʾah.”

Ḥafṣ ibn Ghiyāth related: “One day Sufyān al-Thawrī asked us, ‘Whom are you attending?’ We replied, ‘Ḥajjāj ibn Arṭāʾah.’ He said, ‘Stay with him, for no one left is better acquainted with what issues from his own mind than he is.’”

Ḥammād ibn Zayd said, “Ḥajjāj ibn Arṭāʾah’s hadith carries more weight with us than that of Sufyān.”

Ibn Ḥumayd al-Rāzī, quoting Jarīr, said, “I saw Ḥajjāj dyeing his hair black.”

Aḥmad al-ʿIjlī said, “He was a jurist, one of Kūfa’s muftis. Yet he had an air of pride and used to say, ‘Love of prestige has been my undoing.’”

He later served as the judge of Basra. His hadith is acceptable, save that he was prone to irsāl (omitting a link in the chain): he would transmit from Yaḥyā ibn Abī Kathīr without having heard a single report from him, and from Makḥūl, though he had not—