of Ibn Shihab?’ He answered, “Ahmad ibn Salih and Muhammad ibn Yahya al-Naysaburi.”

ʿAbd Allah ibn Ishaq al-Nahawandi, the ḥāfiẓ, said: “I heard Yaʿqub ibn Sufyan say, ‘I have written from (1) a thousand-plus teachers, all of them trustworthy; yet there are only two men I would present before Allah as proof: Ahmad ibn Salih in Egypt and Ahmad ibn Hanbal in Iraq (2).’ ”

I say: The soundness of this assertion is debatable, for Yaʿqub did not write from a thousand shaykhs, nor even half that number. His catalogue of teachers (3) is preserved in a slim volume, and the gap between the two Ahmads in the breadth of their travels, the number of their teachers, their eminence, and their virtue is wide indeed.

Al-Bukhari said: “Ahmad ibn Salih is reliable, truthful (4); I have never seen anyone criticize him with a valid proof. Ahmad ibn Hanbal, ʿAli, Ibn Numayr, and others spoke in praise (5) of Ahmad ibn Salih. ʿAli used to say, ‘Ask Ahmad, for he is the most accurate (6).’ ”

Khalaf al-Khayyam related: “I heard Salih ibn Muhammad say that Ahmad ibn Salih said, ‘Ibn Wahb possessed one hundred thousand hadith; I wrote fifty thousand of them from him (7).’ ”

Salih added: “In Egypt there was no one who handled hadith well or who had it memorized except Ahmad ibn Salih; he understood hadith, knew how to take it properly, and he was a man….”