ʿAmr ibn ʿAlī said, “The most reliable among Qatadah’s disciples are Saʿid, Hisham, Shuʿbah, and Hammam.

Ibn ʿAdiyy reported: Ishaq ibn Yusuf—so far as I recall, from ʿAbd Allah ibn Ahmad—transmitted from his father that, while still a young man, Yahya ibn Saʿid once gave testimony in court and Hammam was acting as the assessor of probity. Because Hammam did not declare Yahya upright, Yahya afterwards spoke against him on that account.

ʿAbd Allah ibn al-Mubarak said, “Hammam is reliable in what he narrates from Qatadah.”

Muhammad ibn al-Minhal said, “I heard Yazid ibn Zurayʿ say: ‘Hammam’s memory is poor, but his written material is sound.’ ”

Ibn Saʿd said, “He is trustworthy, though he may at times be mistaken.”

Abu Zurʿah said, “There is nothing objectionable about Hammam.”

Ibn Abi Hatim said: My father was asked about Hammam and Aban, and he replied, “I prefer Hammam when he narrates from his notebook; if he narrates from memory, the two are comparable in retention and in the slips they make.” (1)

He also said: I asked my father again about Hammam, and he replied, “Reliable and truthful, though his memory has some weakness. In narrations from Qatadah I prefer him to Hammad ibn Salamah and to Aban.”

ʿAffan related from Hammam that he said, “If you notice any grammatical error in my hadith, correct it, for Qatadah never committed solecisms.”

The ḥāfiẓ ʿAbd Allah ibn ʿAdiyy said, “Hammam is too well-known and too truthful for me to have to cite a particular hadith on his behalf. His reports from Qatadah are sound, and in transmitting from Yahya ibn Abi Kathir he holds a leading place.”

We have come across Hammam’s narration with a high chain in al-Firyabi’s work ‘The Description of Hypocrisy’ (2), and I have already cited it