When Ibn Luhayʿah passed away, al-Layth said, “He has left no equal behind.”

There is no doubt that Ibn Luhayʿah was, together with al-Layth, the leading scholar of Egypt—just as, in that same era, Imām Mālik was the scholar of Medina, al-Awzāʿī of greater Syria, Maʿmar of Yemen, Shuʿbah and al-Thawrī of Iraq, and Ibrāhīm ibn Ṭahmān of Khurasan. Yet Ibn Luhayʿah showed laxity in precision and transmitted aberrant reports, and so he was deemed unfit to serve as an independent authority for legal proof.

Some ḥuffāẓ still cite his hadiths, employing them for corroboration, comparative study, works on asceticism, and apocalyptic literature (1), but not in the core doctrinal texts (2).

Others go to extremes in weakening him, but he ought not to be discarded altogether; one should simply avoid those aberrant narrations, for the man himself was upright.

He briefly held the office of chief judge of the province during the reign of al-Manṣūr—less than a year—before being removed.

The compilers of the two Ṣaḥīḥs refrained from including his narrations, whereas Abū Dāwūd, al-Tirmidhī, and al-Qazwīnī did transmit from him. What reaches us from him through Ibn Wahb, al-Muqriʾ, and the early transmitters is of superior quality.