and by trusting every person, and by giving admonition where it is out of place.
He—may Allah have mercy on him—died in Shawwal of the year 254 AH. He lived for eighty-eight years.
Muḥammad ibn Biṭṭīkh and a number of others told us: Nāṣiḥ told us; Shuhda told us; Ibn Ṭalḥa told us; Abū ʿUmar ibn Mahdī told us; al-Maḥāmilī narrated to us; Muḥammad ibn Manṣūr narrated to us; Yaʿqūb ibn Ibrāhīm narrated to us; my father narrated, from Ibn Isḥāq; Muḥammad ibn Ṭalḥa ibn Yazīd told me, from Ibrāhīm ibn Saʿd, from his father, that he heard the Prophet ﷺ say to ʿAlī, when he left him in charge:
“Are you not pleased, O ʿAlī, to stand in relation to me as Aaron did to Moses—except that there will be no prophet after me?”
- Muḥammad ibn Rāfiʿ ibn Abī Zayd al-Qushayrī—(al-Bukhārī, Muslim, Abū Dāwūd, al-Nasaʾī, al-Tirmidhī).
His given name was Sābūr. He was an imam, a ḥāfiẓ, an unimpeachable authority, a model, and one of the last of the great scholars—Abū ʿAbd Allāh al-Qushayrī, their client, from Nīshāpūr. He was born in the early 170s AH during the lifetime of Imam Mālik, and he began travelling in search of knowledge in the early 190s AH.