Muhammad ibn Shuʿayb related: Umayyah then added, “He combined devotion in worship, vast knowledge, and speaking the truth.”

Al-ʿAbbās ibn al-Walīd al-Bayrūtī said: A man from the descendants of al-Aḥnaf ibn Qays told me:

News reached al-Thawri—while he was in Mecca—that al-Awzāʿī had arrived. He went out to meet him and caught up with him at Dhī Tuwa (1). When he met him, he unfastened the camel’s halter from the caravan string, placed it over his own neck, and began weaving his way forward with it. Whenever he passed a group of people he would say, “Clear the way for the shaykh.” (2)

A similar version was narrated by the hadith scholar Sulaymān ibn Aḥmad al-Wāsitī, who reported it from ʿUthmān ibn ʿĀṣim.

Something close to it was also transmitted by Isḥāq ibn ʿAbbād al-Khuṭṭalī (3) from his father, that al-Thawri … with like wording.

Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal said: Sufyān al-Thawri and al-Awzāʿī visited Mālik. After they had left, he remarked, “One of them possesses more knowledge than the other but is not suited to leadership, whereas the other is fit for leadership”—meaning that al-Awzāʿī was the one suited to lead (4).

Maslamah ibn Thābit reported from Mālik that he said, “Al-Awzāʿī is an imam to be followed.”

Al-Shādhakūnī said: I heard Ibn ʿUyaynah say:

Al-Awzāʿī and al-Thawri were in Minā. Al-Awzāʿī said to al-Thawri, “Why do you not raise your hands when lowering into bowing and when rising from it?”

He answered, “Yazīd ibn Abī Ziyād narrated to us …” (5). Al-Awzāʿī replied, “Az-Zuhri narrated to you—from Sālim, from his father—from the Prophet ﷺ, and yet you set against me Yazīd, a man whose hadith is weak!