“Shuʿbah did not regard it permissible on the day of Ṣiffīn, nor did he consider taking up arms with ʿAlī acceptable—so would he then endorse rising up with Ibrāhīm? I myself heard Shuʿbah say, ‘I do not know whether they were wrong or right.’”

Yaḥyā ibn Maʿīn said: ʿAbd al-Ṣamad reported that his father never wrote down a single word from Ayyūb al-Sakhtiyānī until the latter died. Such is how the report has reached us, but it is an error, for he certainly did relate from Ayyūb.

ʿUbayd Allāh al-Qawārīrī said: I never saw Yaḥyā al-Qaṭṭān transmit from any of our teachers before that teacher’s death except from ʿAbd al-Wārith.

It is related from Ḥammād ibn Zayd that he used to forbid taking knowledge from ʿAbd al-Wārith because of his stance on qadar (predestination).

Yazīd ibn Zurayʿ said: “Whoever attends the gathering of ʿAbd al-Wārith, let him not come near me.”

I say: In spite of all that, his narrations are included in the six canonical collections.

He survived Ḥammād ibn Zayd by only a few months and died in Muḥarram of the year 180 AH.

Muʿādh ibn Muʿādh said: Yaḥyā al-Qaṭṭān and I asked Shuʿbah about some hadith of Abū al-Tayyāḥ. He replied, “What is keeping you from that door?”—meaning ʿAbd al-Wārith—“for I have never seen anyone with a firmer grasp of the hadith of Abū al-Tayyāḥ than he.”

So we rose, went to him, questioned him, and he narrated them to us as though they were inscribed upon his heart.