He narrated hadith from Humayd al-Tawil, Sulayman al-Taymi, Hisham ibn ʿUrwah, Layth ibn Abi Sulaym, Abu Malik al-Ashjaʿi, Ismaʿil ibn Abi Khalid, and a number of others.
Among those who transmitted from him are Ahmad ibn Hanbal, Muhammad ibn ʿAbd Allah ibn Numayr, Abu Bakr ibn Abi Shaybah, Ishaq ibn Rahuyah, Abu Kurayb, Abu Saʿid al-Ashajj, Yusuf ibn Musa, Hannad, al-Hasan ibn Hammad Sajjada, al-Hasan ibn Hammad al-Dabbi, al-Hasan ibn Hammad al-Muradi, and many others.
Al-ʿIjli said, “He is trustworthy; he used to hire himself out to merchants.”
Abu Hatim said, “Truthful,” and a number of scholars declared him reliable.
Ibn Maʿin said, “Truthful, though not an authority,” and Ibn ʿAdi agreed with him on this (1).
Muʿawiyah ibn Salih reported from Ibn Maʿin: “He is reliable, but not firmly established.”
I say: He was known for his goodness and religiosity. He did, however, have one misstep—joining the revolt of Ibrahim ibn ʿAbd Allah ibn Hasan (2)—yet his hadith is accepted as evidence in all the principal collections.
(1) The author states in his Mizan, 2/200: Ibn Adi, after quoting several reports in which the narrator was contradicted, remarks in his al-Kamil: “He is, as Yahya said, truthful (saduq) but not a decisive authority (hujja); his problem lies in weak memory.” I – says al-Dhahabi – add: “The man appears in the chains of all six canonical collections; he transmits a great deal and, like others, occasionally errs.”
Abu Bakr al-Bazzar, as cited by al-Hafiz Ibn Hajar in the introduction to Fath al-Bari, p. 405, observes: “The experts in transmission agree that he was not a hafiz; he reported from al-Aʿmash and others narrations that no one else corroborated.”
Ibn Hajar notes that al-Bukhari records roughly three of his hadiths—through Hamid, Hisham b. ʿUrwa and ʿUbayd Allah b. ʿAbd Allah b. ʿUmar—all of which are supported by other authorities; he also cites one suspended (muʿallaq) report from al-Aʿmash on fasting, whereas the remaining five compilers include more of his material.
(2) He died in Basra in 145/762, on the first night of Ramadan, under the governorship of Abu…