Asadī by lineage, Rawājinī in origin, a resident of Kūfah—and, in the view of the critics, an innovator.

He reported from Sharik the Judge, ʿAbbad ibn al-ʿAwwām, Ibrāhīm ibn Abī Yahyā, al-Walīd ibn Abī Thawr, Ismāʿīl ibn ʿAyyāsh, ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿAbd al-Quddūs, al-Ḥusayn—son of the martyr Zayd ibn ʿAlī—ʿAlī ibn Hāshim ibn al-Barīd, and a number of others.

Those who transmitted from him include: al-Bukhārī, who cites a single hadith in which he couples him with another narrator; al-Tirmidhī; Ibn Mājah; Abū Bakr al-Bazzār; Ṣāliḥ Jazarah; Ibn Khuzaymah; Muḥammad ibn ʿAlī al-Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī; Ibn Saʿid; Ibn Abī Dāwūd; and many others.

Abū Ḥātim said: “An elderly narrator, trustworthy.”

Al-Ḥākim reported that Ibn Khuzaymah used to say, “The reliable one in his transmission, yet suspect in his religion—ʿAbbād ibn Yaʿqūb—narrated to us.”

Ibn ʿAdī said, “He was extreme in his pro-Shīʿī tendency.”

ʿAbdān related—on the authority of a reliable informant—that ʿAbbād used to revile the early generations.

Ibn ʿAdī also remarked, “He transmitted aberrant reports concerning both merits and faults.”

ʿAlī ibn Muḥammad al-Ḥabībī narrated, from Ṣāliḥ Jazarah: “ʿAbbād would curse ʿUthmān—may Allah be pleased with him—and I heard him say, ‘Allah is too just to admit Ṭalḥah and al-Zubayr into Paradise; they fought ʿAlī after having pledged allegiance to him.’”

Ibn Jarīr said: “I heard him declare, ‘Whoever does not, each day in his prayer, disavow the enemies of the Family of Muḥammad will be resurrected alongside them.’”

I (the author) say: This kind of speech is the very seed of rafḍ (Shiʿite rejectionism). Rather, we withhold and seek forgiveness for the entire ummah, for indeed the Family of—