It is related from al-Ribāṭī that he said: “I went to Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal, and he would not so much as lift his head toward me. So I said, ‘Abū ʿAbd Allāh, ḥadith is being written down from me in Khurāsān; if you treat me like this, they will throw my reports away.’ He replied, ‘Ahmad, must it not be said on the Day of Resurrection, “Where is ʿAbd Allāh ibn Ṭāhir and his followers?”—so consider well where you will be in relation to him!’ I said, ‘I was only put in charge of the affairs of the ribāṭ (frontier garrison).’ Yet he kept repeating those words to me (1).
Al-Ribāṭī died in 245 AH. It has also been said: 243 AH.
Ibn ʿAsākir informed us; ʿAbd al-Raḥīm ibn Abī Saʿd informed us; Saʿīd ibn al-Ḥusayn informed us; al-Faḍl ibn al-Muḥibb informed us; Abū al-Ḥusayn al-Khaffāf informed us; Muḥammad ibn Isḥāq narrated to us; Aḥmad ibn Saʿīd al-Ribāṭī narrated to us; Maḥbūb ibn al-Ḥasan narrated to us; Dāwūd narrated from al-Shaʿbī, from Masrūq, from ʿĀʾishah, who said:
“Prayer for both the resident and the traveller was originally prescribed as two rakʿahs, two rakʿahs (units of prayer) (2). When the Messenger of Allah settled in Medina, two additional rakʿahs were added to the prayer of the resident, while the dawn prayer was left unchanged because of the length of its recitation, and the sunset prayer because it is the witr (odd-numbered prayer) of the daytime” (3).