a single ḥadith from anyone comparable to Yaḥyā ibn Saʿīd.”

Ibn Maʿīn said, “Yaḥyā al-Qaṭṭān related only one report from al-Awzāʿī.”

Abū Qudāmah al-Sarakhsī recounted: “I heard Yaḥyā ibn Saʿīd say, ‘Every leading scholar I met used to state that faith is both speech and action and that it increases and decreases. They declared the Jahmiyyah (1) to be unbelievers, and they accorded Abū Bakr and ʿUmar priority in merit and in the caliphate.’”

Musaddad reports from Yaḥyā: “I never transmitted anything from Sufyān al-Thawrī except what he himself told me—‘he informed me,’ ‘he related to us’—apart from two reports consisting of statements by Ibrāhīm and ʿIkrimah.”

Abū Bakr al-Ṣaghānī said, “Ibn Maʿīn told me, ‘Yaḥyā ibn Saʿīd outranks Yazīd ibn Zurayʿ, Khālid ibn al-Ḥārith and Muʿādh ibn Muʿādh.’”

Yaḥyā said, “I would sometimes go to al-Taymī and find no one at all with him, and when he narrated among Banū Murrah he would have only five or six listeners.”

Al-Ḥāfiẓ Ibn ʿAmmār remarked, “If you looked at Yaḥyā al-Qaṭṭān in his merchant’s garb, you would think he knew nothing; but when he spoke, the jurists fell silent to listen.”

Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad ibn Yaḥyā al-Qaṭṭān said, “My grandfather never joked; he would not laugh except with a faint smile, he never entered a public bathhouse, and he used to dye his beard.”

And Yaḥyā ibn Maʿīn reported, “Yaḥyā ibn Saʿīd spent twenty years completing a full recitation of the Qur’an every single night.”