and his rank in knowledge, religious devotion, and noble stature was unrivalled.
It is said that he was already issuing legal verdicts as a young man during the lifetime of Mālik.

Al-Maʾmūn summoned him to Khurāsān, treated him with extraordinary honour, and appointed him heir apparent. This provoked an uproar among the descendants of al-Manṣūr; his days thereafter were not many, and he died (1).

Weak narrators transmitted from him: Abū ’l-Ṣalt ʿAbd al-Salām al-Harawī, Aḥmad ibn ʿĀmir al-Ṭāʾī, and ʿAbd Allāh ibn al-ʿAbbās al-Qazwīnī.

It is also claimed that the following reported from him—though Ādam ibn Abī Īyās was older than he—namely: Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal, Muḥammad ibn Rāfiʿ, Naṣr ibn ʿAlī al-Jahḍamī, and the emir Khālid ibn Aḥmad al-Dhuhlī; yet scarcely any chain of transmission leading to him is sound.

Al-Mufīd—who is not trustworthy—related: ‘ʿAbd Allāh ibn Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal told us; my father told us; ʿAlī ibn Mūsā narrated to us, from his father …’ and he cited a report whose text is repudiated.

From ʿAlī ibn Mūsā al-Riḍā, on the authority of his father, who said:
‘When the world turns toward a man, it bestows upon him the virtues of others; but when it turns away, it strips him even of his own virtues.’

Al-Ṣūlī said: Aḥmad ibn Yaḥyā narrated to us that al-Shaʿbī said, ‘The proudest line of poetry ever recited is what the Anṣār proclaimed on the Day of Badr:
“At Badr’s well, when their faces were driven back—
Gabriel beneath our banner, and Muhammad.”

Al-Ṣūlī then said: “Still prouder is the verse of al-Ḥasan ibn Hāniʾ concerning ʿAlī ibn Mūsā al-Riḍā:
‘They said to me, “You stand alone among men in every…
utterance that flows from eloquent speech.”’”}