Abū Bakr al-Khallāl said: “Al-Athram was held in high esteem, a ḥāfiẓ. When ʿĀṣim ibn ʿAlī arrived in Baghdad he looked for someone who could extract useful narrations for him to dictate, but at that time he found no one (1) except Abū Bakr al-Athram. On seeing him, however, he was not impressed, because the man was still young.

Abū Bakr said to him, ‘Bring out your books.’

He then began telling him, ‘This ḥadīth is incorrect, this one is mistaken, and this one is such-and-such.’ ʿĀṣim ibn ʿAlī was delighted with him and dictated nearly fifty sittings (2).

Al-Athram knew the ḥadīth and retained it by heart. When he later attached himself to Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal he left that occupation and devoted himself to Aḥmad’s school.

I heard Abū Bakr al-Marrūdhī say that al-Athram declared, ‘I used to have everything committed to memory—meaning jurisprudence and the divergent opinions—but once I kept company with Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal I abandoned all of it.’

He possessed a remarkable alertness, to the point that Yaḥyā ibn Maʿīn and Yaḥyā ibn Ayyūb al-Maqābirī said, ‘One of al-Athram’s parents must have been a jinn’ (3).

Al-Khallāl then said: Abū Bakr ibn Ṣadaqah told me, ‘I heard Abū al-Qāsim ibn al-Khattalī (4) say:

A man (5) once stood up and said, “I want someone to copy for me, from the Book of Prayer, material that is not found in the works of Abū Bakr ibn Abī Shaybah.”

We told him, “No one can do that for you except Abū Bakr al-Athram.”

So they sent him some sheets, and he wrote six hundred pages from the Book of Prayer. We examined them and discovered that Ibn Abī Shaybah’s compilation contained none of it (1)."