Muʿādh ibn Hishām said, “My father lived—meaning, he remained alive—for seventy-eight years.”
I say: This indicates that he was older than Abū Ḥanīfah and Shuʿbah, and that he was born while Jābir ibn ʿAbd Allāh and a number of other Companions were still alive.
Abū al-Ḥasan al-Maymūnī said: “Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal narrated to us, from ʿAbd al-Ṣamad ibn ʿAbd al-Wārith, who said: ‘Hishām ibn Abī ʿAbd Allāh died in the year 152 AH; there were seven years between him and Qatādah—that is, in their birth years.’”
Zayd ibn al-Ḥubāb said, “I visited him in 153 AH, and he passed away a few days later.”
Abū al-Walīd and ʿAmr al-Fallās said, “He died in 154 AH.”
I say: His narrations are found in every one of the canonical collections except the Muwaṭṭaʾ.
Our teachers—the imāms Yaḥyā ibn Abī Manṣūr, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Muḥammad, al-Muslim ibn Muḥammad, ʿAlī ibn Aḥmad, and Aḥmad ibn ʿAbd al-Salām—authorized us to transmit, saying that ʿAmr ibn Muḥammad informed us, Hibat Allāh ibn al-Ḥusayn informed us, Muḥammad ibn Ghaylān informed us, Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd Allāh related to us, Muḥammad ibn Shaddād al-Mismaʿī narrated to us, saying: “Abū ʿĀmir narrated to us …”
…and people like them, when they merely followed what they had inherited; and to Umar b. Dharr, Ibrahim al-Taymi, Masar b. Kidam and their contemporaries, when they exercised their own judgment. If we were to discard their hadith because of their particular schools, that would open the door to abandoning all the sunnan until only a very small portion remained in our hands.
The sound view on this question, as Shaykh Muhammad Bakhit al-Mutii states in his marginal notes on Nihayat al-Sul (3/744), is that the report of anyone who belongs to the qibla is to be accepted: whoever performs the prayer as we do and believes, in general, in everything brought by our Prophet—provided he regards lying as forbidden. Such a person could not introduce a bidʿa (heterodox innovation) except on the basis of an interpretation, grounding his position on the Book of God or the sunnah of His Messenger as he understands them by his own ijtihad; and every mujtahid is rewarded, even if he errs.
By contrast, whoever denies a matter that is mutawatir (mass-transmitted) in the Sharia and universally known to be part of the religion, or affirms its opposite, is certainly a kafir, for such issues admit no ijtihad. Persisting in this amounts to obstinate rejection of something necessarily known from the religion; he is thus an open unbeliever whose narration is absolutely inadmissible, whether or not he considers lying unlawful.