he nevertheless freed himself from much of that, thanks to the breadth of his studies and the sharpness of his insight.

His pupil Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn al-Ṣafadī, d. 764 AH, said: “I detected in him neither the rigidity of many ḥadīth specialists nor the dull-wittedness of mere transmitters; rather, he is a jurist in his reasoning, well-versed in people’s opinions and in the schools of the early Imams as well as the doctrines of later scholars.

“What impressed me most in his writings is that he never cites a ḥadīth without clarifying any weakness in its matn, any obscurity in its isnād, or any criticism levelled against its narrators—something I have not seen anyone else take such pains to do.” (2)

Such mastery of ḥadīth empowered al-Dhahabī to declare narrators sound or unsound, to draw subsidiary rulings, to authenticate, to analyze hidden defects, and even to amend the assessments of the great scholars who preceded him (3). As his student Tāj al-Dīn al-Subkī put it, “he entered every gate of this science” (4), and his contemporaries dubbed him “the muḥaddith of the age” (5).

The leading ḥadīth scholar of his time, Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī, d. 852 AH, acknowledged al-Dhahabī’s pre-eminence to the point that he drank from the water of Zamzam and supplicated Allah to grant him al-Dhahabī’s level of memorization and acuity (6).