ʿAbd al-Malik. He answered, “I never heard anything from him; rather, So-and-so narrated it to me from him.” The man then went to Ibn Mahdī, told him what had happened, and Ibn Mahdī thereupon disparaged ʿUmar and spoke against him.

Abū ʿAbd Allāh said, “Most of what he used to relate to us came from Ibn Jurayj (1).

“He also narrated from al-Awzāʿī.” Someone asked him, “Then do you transmit from him?” He replied, “I had, in the past, transmitted a few things from him.”

Abū Ṭālib reported: I heard Aḥmad say, “I do not transmit from ʿUmar ibn Hārūn, even though I once narrated a great deal from him. But Ibn Mahdī used to say, ‘He held no worth in my eyes,’ and I was informed that he said, ‘He gave me certain reports; when he came back again he narrated those same reports to me through Ismāʿīl ibn ʿAyyāsh from those men, so I abandoned his ḥadith.’ ”

ʿAlī ibn al-Ḥusayn ibn Ḥibbān said: I found in my grandfather’s handwriting that Abū Zakariyyā wrote: “ʿUmar ibn Hārūn al-Balkhī is a liar, depraved; his ḥadith is worthless. I had written from him and even spent the night at his door by Bāb al-Kūfah. We accompanied him to Nahrawān, but afterwards his true nature became clear to us, so I burned all of his ḥadiths. Not a single word from him remains with me, except for a few reports on the back of a notebook—I tore them all out.”

I said to Abū Zakariyyā, “What became clear to you about him?” He replied, “ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Mahdī said—and I did not hear it directly from him, but this is well-known of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān—‘He came to us and narrated from Jaʿfar ibn Muḥammad. We examined his date of birth and the year he left for Mecca, and found that Jaʿfar had died before he even set out’ (2).”

ʿAbbās and Aḥmad ibn Zuhayr reported from Yaḥyā that he said, “He is nothing.” Ibn Muḥriz and al-Ghalābī likewise reported from Yaḥyā that he said, “He is not reliable.” And from Yaḥyā