his head and said, “He is nothing.”

He added, “This man must be one of two types: either he narrates from memory or he reads from his notebook.”

Then he said, “In my estimation he amounts to nothing.”

Someone asked, “But what about his having memorised three thousand?”

He replied, “That is the easy part—he was simply drilled in them.”

Yaʿqūb as-Sadūsī said, “He is truthful, but his memory is volatile, especially after he lost his sight.”

Abū Ḥātim said, “Truthful, yet he practises tadlīs—and he does so often.”

Al-Bukhārī said, “He went blind, and people then fed him reports that were not his.”

An-Nasāʾī said, “He is neither reliable nor trustworthy.”

Sulaymān ibn al-Ashʿath told me, “I heard Yaḥyā ibn Maʿīn say, ‘The blood of Suwayd ibn Saʿīd is lawful.’”

Ṣāliḥ Jazara said, “He is truthful, but once he became blind he was prompted with hadith that were not his.”

Al-Ḥākim Abū Aḥmad said, “He lost his sight at the end of his life, so he might at times have been coached with material that was not from him. Whoever heard from him while he could still see—his narrations from him are sounder.”

Abū Bakr al-Aʿyan said, “He is a shaykh who gets by on scant means.”

Saʿīd ibn ʿAmr al-Baradhīʿī said, “I saw Abū Zurʿah disparage Suwayd ibn Saʿīd and say, ‘I witnessed something from him that displeased me.’”

I asked, “What was it?”

He replied, “When I returned from Egypt, I passed by him and stayed with him. I said, ‘I have some hadith of Ibn Wahb, from Dimām, that you do not possess.’

“He said, ‘Remind me of them.’

“So I produced the books and began reviewing them with him. Each time I reviewed a report he would say, ‘Dimām narrated this to us,’ and he would pass off as his own the hadith of Ḥarīz ibn ʿUthmān, the hadith of Niyār ibn Mukram, and the hadith of ʿAbd…"