—Allah that a man approach a woman while she is menstruating; when he does, Satan gets to her before him, she conceives from him, and the child turns out effeminate.’

Ibn ʿAdī said: Aḥmad alone narrated it (1).

Khalid ibn Saʿd (2) al-Andalusi said: I heard Saʿīd ibn ʿUthmān al-Aʿnaqī (3), Saʿd ibn Muʿādh, and Muḥammad ibn Fuṭays praising Aḥmad, the nephew of Ibn Wahb, and declaring him reliable. Al-Aʿnaqī added: “When we reached Egypt we found Yūnus difficult to deal with, but Aḥmad was easier, so we collected some dinars for him, gave them to him, and read to him his uncle’s Muwaṭṭaʾ and his Jāmiʿ.”

I also heard Ibn Fuṭays say: “I felt uneasy about the matter, so I wanted to ask Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd Allah ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam. I said, ‘May Allah set you right—does a scholar take payment for the recitation of knowledge?’ He seemed to realize that I was really asking about the nephew of Ibn Wahb, and he said to me, ‘It is permissible—may Allah grant you well-being—lawful for me not to read even a single page for you except for one dirham. What obliges me to sit with you all day long and neglect the livelihood I must pursue and the expenses of my family?!’

What Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam said applies to someone who depends on his earnings and would lose his trade and livelihood because he is occupied with narrating—just as ʿAlī ibn Bayān al-Razzāz, who alone possessed the elevated transmission of the fascicle of Ibn ʿArafah, used to say when he charged a dinar for reciting it: ‘You are only asking me…’