—saying: “With my own hand I have written one million hadiths, and any report that cannot be found here”—and he pointed toward the baskets—“is a fabrication.”
Mujāhid ibn Mūsā said, “Yaḥyā ibn Maʿīn used to write each hadith a little over fifty times.”
Muḥammad ibn ʿAlī ibn Dāwūd related, “I heard Ibn Maʿīn say, ‘I yearn to meet a trustworthy shaykh who has a house filled with books, so that I might copy from him alone.’ ”
Muḥammad ibn Saʿd said, “Yaḥyā ibn Maʿīn devoted himself to writing hadith and became renowned for it, yet he scarcely narrated.”
Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad ibn Abī Mahzūl, citing Muḥammad ibn Ḥafṣ, reported that ʿAmr al-Nāqid said, “Among our companions none retained the subject-headings better than Aḥmad, none recited hadith more fluently than Ibn al-Shadhakūnī, and none knew the chains of transmission better than Yaḥyā; no one ever managed to reverse an isnād on him.”
Al-Qawārīrī said: “Yaḥyā ibn Saʿīd told me, ‘No one like these two has come to us—Aḥmad and Ibn Maʿīn.’ ”
Hārūn ibn Bashīr al-Rāzī said, “I saw Yaḥyā ibn Maʿīn facing the qiblah with his hands raised, supplicating, ‘O Allah, if I have ever spoken about a man, declaring him a liar when in fact he was not so in my view, then do not forgive me.’ ”
This account is objectionable.
Al-Ḥasan ibn ʿUlail al-ʿAnazī narrated: “Yaḥyā ibn Maʿīn told us, ‘ʿAffān made mistakes in a little over twenty hadiths. I never informed anyone of them; I told him privately. Later Khalaf ibn Sālim urged me, saying, “Tell me—what are they?” I did not tell him, for he wished to find fault with him.’ ”