and the ṣiddīqīn (the ever-truthful). Had I wished, I could have filled volumes with such examples. O Allah, do not place in our hearts any rancor toward those who believe; our Lord, You are indeed Most Kind, Most Merciful. ⦗1⦘

Al-Dhahabī was not a man who merely echoed the critical judgments of others; whenever he found no solid evidence supporting their views he would part company with them. A case in point is his notice on Zayd ibn Wahb al-Juhanī, one of the Successors. Abū Yaʿqūb al-Fasawī, in his Taʾrīkh, had spoken against this narrator and claimed that his ḥadīth contained serious flaws. Al-Dhahabī replied, “Al-Fasawī’s statement carries no weight.” ⦗2⦘ In Mizān al-Iʿtidāl he reproduced al-Fasawī’s objections, refuted them one by one, and then concluded: “This point that al-Fasawī found objectionable in his ḥadīth is something in which no one had preceded him. Were we to open the door to such misgivings, we would—on the basis of corrupt conjecture—end up rejecting many well-established sunan.” ⦗3⦘ Mizān is full of critiques of this sort, so there is no need to multiply examples.

Indeed, we find him authoring two separate works in which he rebuts a number of specialists in al-jarḥ wa-l-taʿdīl: “A Treatise on Trustworthy Narrators Who Have Been Criticized on Grounds That Do Not Require Their Rejection,” and “Those Who Were Spoken Against Yet Declared Reliable.”

Al-Dhahabī’s critical eye was not limited to narrators; it extended as well to the very sources he read, abridged, or cited—a practice now termed source-criticism. One example is his appraisal of the book al-Ḍuʿafāʾ by Ibn al-Jawzī (d. 597 AH), which he abridged and annotated. In the biography of Abān ibn Yazīd al-ʿAṭṭār he writes: “The esteemed scholar Ibn al-Jawzī also listed him in al-Ḍuʿafāʾ but did not cite the statements of those who declared him reliable. This is one of the defects of his book: he records the disparagement yet remains silent about the attestation.” ⦗4⦘ And in the entry for Ḥafṣ