Sufyān ibn ʿUyaynah said: People once said to al-Aʿmash, “Misʿar is unsure about the ḥadith he narrates.” He replied, “His uncertainty equals other people’s certainty.”
Khalid ibn ʿAmr related: “I saw Misʿar with a forehead that looked like a goat’s knee because of constant prostration, and whenever he looked at you (1) you would think he was staring at the wall, so pronounced was his squint.”
Ibn ʿUyaynah also transmitted from Misʿar that he said: “I entered upon Abū Jaʿfar, Commander of the Believers, and said, ‘O Commander of the Believers! We are, with respect to you, as parents, and you are to us as a child’—his grandmother, Umm al-Faḍl, was of the Hilāl tribe, that is, the mother of Ibn ʿAbbās. He replied, ‘You have approached me through the dearest of my mothers to me; if all people were like you, I would gladly walk with them along the road.’”
Abū Mushir reported: al-Ḥakam ibn Hishām narrated to us, Misʿar narrated: “Abū Jaʿfar summoned me to appoint me to office. I said, ‘My family remark, “We are not even happy for you to buy something for us worth two dirhams, and now you would make me a governor?! May Allah set matters right for you; there is between us kinship and a rightful claim.”’ So he excused me.”
Saʿd ibn ʿAbbād said: Muḥammad ibn Misʿar told us, “My father would not go to sleep until he had recited half of the Qur’an.”
Sufyān ibn ʿUyaynah said: I heard Misʿar say, “Whoever dislikes me, Allah turns him into a ḥadith narrator.”
Misʿar also said, “Whoever can live on vinegar and greens will never be enslaved.”
On another occasion he said to a man wearing fine clothes—even though he was a student of ḥadith—“This is not the equipment of ḥadith-seeking.”
Sufyān ibn ʿUyaynah further said, quoting Maʿn: “I never saw Misʿar on any day without finding him better than he had been the previous day.”
Muḥammad ibn Saʿd observed: Misʿar had a devout mother whom he served diligently. He inclined to the doctrine of the Murjiʾah (2). When he died, neither Sufyān al-Thawrī nor al-Ḥasan ibn Ṣāliḥ attended his funeral.