He narrated from: his father; his father’s paternal aunt, Umm Bakr bint al-Miswar (1); Saʿd ibn Ibrāhīm the judge; Saʿīd al-Maqburī; ʿUthmān al-Akhnasī; Yazīd ibn ʿAbd Allāh; and Ismāʿīl ibn Muḥammad ibn Saʿd.

Narrators on his authority include: ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Mahdī, Muḥammad ibn ʿUmar al-Wāqidī, Khālid ibn Makhlad, Yaḥyā al-Ḥimmānī, Yaḥyā ibn Yaḥyā al-Tamīmī, and several others.

He was a jurist, a mufti, and well-versed in the maghāzī (the Prophet’s military expeditions).

Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal and others deemed him reliable.

Yaḥyā ibn Maʿīn said, “He is truthful, though not firmly established.”

It is related from Aḥmad that he preferred him to Ibn Abī Dhīb. Yaʿqūb ibn Shaybah states in Musnad al-ʿAbbās: “I heard Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal and Yaḥyā debating al-Makhramī and Ibn Abī Dhīb (2). Aḥmad kept putting al-Makhramī ahead, whereas Ibn Maʿīn preferred Ibn Abī Dhīb over him, saying, ‘Al-Makhramī is but an old shaykh—what does he really have?’”

It was also said that he was extremely short.

He possessed virtue, honor, and dignity, yet he had one lapse: he rose with Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn Ḥasan (3), thinking him to be the Mahdī. He later regretted it and said, “No one will ever beguile me again after him.”

Ibn Ḥibbān went to excess and exaggerated, saying: “He narrates from Saʿīd al-Maqburī and Suhayl ibn Abī Ṣāliḥ, but he made many mistakes in reports, even transmitting from reliable narrators what does not resemble the hadith of the well-established. When a person skilled in hadith hears such reports, he recognizes them as reversed, so he deserves to be abandoned.”

I say: How can he be abandoned when the major scholars—apart from al-Bukhārī—used him as evidence and declared him trustworthy?