and Ibn Mājah, Abū Bakr Aḥmad ibn ʿAmr al-Bazzār, ʿUmar ibn Bujayr, Yaḥyā ibn Ṣāʿid, Abū al-ʿAbbās al-Thaqafī, Abū ʿAbd Allāh al-Maḥāmilī, al-Ḥusayn ibn Yaḥyā ibn ʿAyyāsh, and a number of others.

Muḥammad ibn Isḥāq al-Thaqafī said, “He is reliable, trustworthy.”
Al-Khaṭīb remarked, “He was reliable, truthful, devout, and ascetic.”

Toward the end of his life he moved from Baghdad to Ṭarsūs, where he stayed on ribāt (frontier duty) until he died (1).

Al-Baghawī said, “Since Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal I have not seen anyone superior to him. I heard him say, ‘For forty years I have craved meat, yet I will not taste it until I penetrate Byzantine territory and eat of the spoils taken from the Byzantines’” (2).

His son Muḥammad ibn Zuhayr told me, “My father would gather us whenever he completed a recitation of the Qur’an during Ramadan—three times every day and night—so that he finished ninety complete readings in that month” (3).

He died—may Allah have mercy on him—at the close of 257 AH. Others say he died in 258 AH. I say: he passed away at a little over seventy years of age.

Oh, how splendid is Marw and the noble figures it has produced—leaders in knowledge and in faith