a mind ablaze, an intellect so keen that likening him to gold is perfectly apt. He amassed vast learning, brought benefit to countless people, authored prolifically, and through succinct abridgment spared readers the burden of prolix tomes. I met him, studied with him, and read many of his works to him; never did I find in him the stiffness of some hadith specialists or the dull sluggishness of rote transmitters (1).

Although Tāj al-Dīn al-Subkī disagreed with his teacher al-Dhahabī on certain issues and even refuted him, he nevertheless said about him: “Our shaykh and master, the imam, the ḥāfiẓ … the hadith scholar of the age. Our era contains four ḥuffāẓ who stand out above all others: al-Mizzī, al-Barzalī, al-Dhahabī, and the imam—my own father; in their time there is no fifth. As for our teacher Abū ʿAbd Allāh, his insight is without peer; he is a treasure to which one turns when a problem arises, the imam of the world in memorization, the gold of the age in both substance and expression, the shaykh of jarḥ wa-taʿdīl (narrator criticism), and a man among men in every field. It is he who trained us in this craft and admitted us into the ranks of its practitioners” (2).

He also said: “Multitudes heard from him. He continued to serve this discipline until his footing in it became unshakeable. He toiled night and day, yet neither his tongue nor his pen wearied. Proverbs were coined with his name, and his name travelled like his sobriquet—‘the Sun’—except that it does not contract when rain falls, nor set when the nights advance. He resided in Damascus, to which seekers journeyed from every land, and from every quarter questions called out to him” (3).

His disciple al-Ḥusaynī, d. 765 AH, described him as “the shaykh, the imam, the erudite scholar, the shaykh of the hadith scholars, the exemplar of the ḥuffāẓ and Qur’an reciters, the hadith scholar of Damascus, its historian and its teacher” (4), and he said elsewhere: “He was one of …”