Ibn al-Madīnī said, “He is a liar; he used to relate from Ibn Ṭāwūs, yet Ibn Ṭāwūs died before he was even born.” (1)
Al-Dāraqutnī remarked, “His ḥadith are to be abandoned.” (2)
Aḥmad ibn Sayyār said, “He transmits from people he never met, although he was regarded as having a powerful memory.” (3)
Ibn Ḥibbān wrote, “He fabricated reports and attributed them to reliable transmitters. Among them is what he narrated from al-Thawrī, from Hishām ibn ʿUrwah, from his father, from ʿĀʾishah, from the Prophet ﷺ: ‘One day of illness wipes out thirty years [of sins].’ (4)”
I say: Ibn Ḥibbān has mixed this man’s entry with that of Isḥāq ibn Bishr al-Kāhilī al-Kūfī—another ruined narrator as well. (5)
Abū Ḥudhayfah died in Bukhārā, in Rajab of the year 206 AH, as stated by Ghunjar. (6)
(1) Tarikh Baghdad, 6:327.
(2) Tarikh Baghdad, 6:328.
(3) Tarikh Baghdad, 6:327; here, the verb yuwazan means “he is suspected (of fabrication).”
(4) Al-Majruhin, 1:136. In Lisan, 1:355: al-Naqqashi said, “he fabricates hadith”; Abu Bakr b. Abi Shaybah called him “a liar”; Ibn al-Jawzi wrote in al-Mawduat, “the scholars unanimously agree that he is a liar”; al-Khalili stated in al-Irshad that he was “suspected of forging hadith”; Ibn Adi judged his reports “denounced, whether in chain or wording, and no one corroborates them”; al-Khatib declared him “unreliable”; and al-Uqayli considered him “unknown—he transmits reprehensible reports with no basis.”
(5) Al-Mizan, 1:185, adds that Ibn al-Jawzi also blundered, calling this narrator “al-Kahili, the client of Banu Hashim,” an attribution that is incorrect.
(6) The person meant is Muhammad b. Ahmad b. Muhammad b. Sulayman b. Kamil, Abu Abd Allah al-Bukhari, the hadith master and author of Tarikh Bukhara; he died in 412 AH. See al-Ibr, 3:108.