so he would endorse whatever was read out to him. Later he was confronted about a number of those insertions, yet he refused to retract; because of this obstinacy he became deserving of being abandoned.

Ibn Khuzaymah continued to transmit from him, and I heard him say: “One of those whose name we have withheld related traditions to us; he is of the sort who, were he to fall from the sky and be snatched away by the birds, that would be dearer to him (1) than to lie against the Messenger of Allah ﷺ. Yet people corrupted him.” Ibn Khuzaymah would narrate from him only word for word. (2)

I say: He died in Rabīʿ al-Ākhir of the year 247 AH.

In that same year there also died: Ibrāhīm ibn Saʿīd al-Jawharī, Abū ʿUthmān al-Māzinī the grammarian, and the caliph al-Mutawakkil.

It is also said that Salamah ibn Shabīb and the vizier al-Faṭḥ ibn Khāqān died that year.

55 – Al-Rifāʿī, Muḥammad ibn Yazīd ibn Muḥammad * (M, T, Q)

The imam, jurist, ḥāfiẓ, erudite scholar, and judge of Baghdad: Abū Hishām Muḥammad ibn Yazīd ibn Muḥammad ibn Kathīr ibn Rifāʿah al-ʿIjlī, al-Rifāʿī, al-Kūfī, the Qurʾān-reciter.

He narrated from: Abū al-Aḥwaṣ Sallām, al-Muṭṭalib ibn Ziyād, Abū Bakr ibn ʿAyyāsh, Ḥafṣ ibn Ghiyāth, ʿAbd Allāh ibn al-Ajlaḥ, Yaḥyā ibn Yamān, and their peers.