al-Khurasāni al-Asqalāni.

Yaḥyā said, “I questioned him myself and asked, ‘Did you take the books of ʿAlī al-Ṣaydalanī and use them to revise your own?’ He denied it and replied, ‘Their leaves had simply become worn. I inspected them, and whenever I recognized something and found it to accord with my own copies, I corrected it.’ (1)

ʿAlī ibn al-Ḥusayn ibn Ḥibbān relates: I found in my father’s notebook, written in his own hand, that Abū Zakariyyā said:

‘Nuʿaym is trustworthy, reliable, a man of integrity; I know him better than anyone. He was my companion in Basra and wrote down fifty thousand hadiths from Rawḥ. Before I left Egypt I said to him, “These hadiths you took from the Asqalāni—what are they?” He replied, “O Abū Zakariyyā, does someone like you confront me with this?!” I said, “I speak only out of concern for you.” He said (2): “I merely had some manuscripts with me that had been damaged by water, so parts of the text were erased. Whenever a word became unclear, I would look in that man’s book; if it matched my copy, I recognized it. As for having copied anything from him at all—by Allah, besides whom there is no god—I absolutely did not.”

Abū Zakariyyā continued, “Later his nephew came to us, bringing the master copies of his books from Khurasan. Nuʿaym would occasionally imagine something and err in it, but he himself was among the truthful.” (3)

ʿAbbās ibn Muḥammad reports from Ibn Maʿīn, who said:

“We visited Nuʿaym ibn Ḥammād in Egypt. He began reading a book he had composed; he read for a while and then said, ‘Ibn al-Mubārak narrated to us from Ibn ʿAwn several hadiths.’ I said, ‘That is not from Ibn al-Mubārak.’ He became angry and said, ‘You contradict me?!’ I replied, ‘Yes, by Allah, I contradict you; I only seek your good.’ He refused to retract, so I said, ‘By Allah, you never heard this from Ibn al-Mubārak at all, nor is it from Ibn ʿAwn.’ He became angry, and those of his companions who were with him became angry…"