Maʿīn left behind thirty trunks and twenty large jars of books. Yaḥyā ibn Aktham offered two hundred dinars for the collection, but Abū Khaythamah would not allow it to be sold.

With my chain of transmission back to al-Khaṭīb: al-Mālīnī informed us, Ibn ʿAdī informed us, Mūsā ibn al-Qāsim ibn al-Ashyab narrated to us from one of his teachers, who said:

“Aḥmad, Yaḥyā, and ʿAlī were once sitting with ʿAffān—some say with Sulaymān ibn Ḥarb—when a legal deed was brought in. They all acted as witnesses to it, and Yaḥyā wrote the attestation.

“ʿAffān then remarked, ‘As for you, Aḥmad, you are weak when it comes to Ibrāhīm ibn Saʿd; and you, ʿAlī, are weak with respect to Ḥammād ibn Zayd; and you, Yaḥyā, are weak regarding Ibn al-Mubārak.’

“Yaḥyā replied, ‘And you, ʿAffān, are weak concerning Shuʿbah.’”

Al-Khaṭīb commented, “None of them was actually weak; it was only a bit of friendly banter.”

I say: Each of them was relatively junior in relation to that particular teacher and had transmitted only a few reports from him.

ʿAbd al-Khāliq ibn Manṣūr said: I heard Ibn al-Rūmī say, “I have never seen anyone who spoke the unvarnished truth about the senior scholars except Yaḥyā; everyone else would show some partiality in what he said.”

I reply: This statement of ʿAbd Allāh ibn al-Rūmī is not acceptable; he voiced it on the basis of his own opinion. We do not claim infallibility for the imams of narrator criticism, yet they are the most accurate of people, the least prone to error, the most equitable, and the furthest from bias.

Whenever they concur in declaring someone reliable or unreliable, cling to their verdict—bite down on it with your molars—and do not go beyond it, lest you later regret it. As for the one of them who stands apart, his view carries no weight.

So spare yourself the strain and hand the bow to the one who carved it. By Allah, were it not for the great ḥuffāẓ, heretics would be delivering sermons from the pulpits; and if some innovator does ascend the pulpit, it is only by the sword of Islam, the tongue of the Sacred Law, the prestige of the Sunnah, and his outward show of following what the Messenger, peace and blessings be upon him, brought. We seek refuge in Allah from disgrace.

One of the rare occasions on which Ibn Maʿīn—may Allah have mercy on him—departed from the mark was in his criticism of Aḥmad ibn Ṣāliḥ, the ḥāfiẓ