He also heard from: Muḥammad ibn Sābiq, Qurrah ibn Ḥabīb, Abū Nuʿaym, al-Qaʿnabī, Khallād ibn Yaḥyā, ʿAmr ibn Hāshim, ʿĪsā ibn Mīnā—better known as Qālūn—, Isḥāq ibn Muḥammad al-Farwī, ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz ibn ʿAbd Allāh al-Uwaysī, Yaḥyā ibn Bukayr, ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd ibn Bakkār, Ṣafwān ibn Ṣāliḥ, Sulaymān ibn the daughter of Shuraḥbīl, Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal, and others of their rank.
Abū al-Ḥajjāj told us in his Tahdhīb (1): “He was the client (mawlā) of ʿAyyāsh ibn Muṭarrif ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿAyyāsh ibn Abī Rabīʿah al-Makhzūmī.” He then listed his teachers, among them:
Aḥmad ibn Yūnus al-Yarbūʿī, al-Ḥasan ibn Bishr al-Bajalī, al-Ḥasan ibn al-Rabīʿ al-Būrānī, Abū ʿUmar al-Ḥawḍī, al-Rabīʿ ibn Yaḥyā al-Ushnānī, Sahl ibn Bakkār al-Dāramī, Shādh ibn Fayyāḍ, Qabīṣah ibn ʿUqbah, Muḥammad ibn al-Ṣalt al-Asadī, Muslim ibn Ibrāhīm, Mūsā ibn Ismāʿīl, Abū al-Walīd al-Ṭayālisī, and many others.
Our shaykh Abū al-Ḥajjāj also included Abū ʿĀṣim al-Nabīl among them, but this is a mistake; he neither met him nor heard from him, and he did not enter Baṣrah until several years after Abū ʿĀṣim’s death.
He pursued the study of ḥadīth while still young, travelling to the Ḥijāz, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, the Jazīrah, and Khurāsān, and copying a quantity of material that defies description for its sheer volume.
Those who transmitted from him include: Abū Ḥafṣ al-Fallās, Ḥarmalah ibn Yaḥyā, Isḥāq ibn Mūsā al-Khaṭmī, Muḥammad ibn Ḥumayd al-Rāzī, Yūnus ibn ʿAbd al-Aʿlā, al-Rabīʿ al-Murādī—who were also among his teachers—, Ibn Wārah, Abū Ḥātim, Muslim ibn al-Ḥajjāj, a host of his contemporaries, ʿAbd Allāh ibn Aḥmad, Abū Bakr ibn Abī Dāwūd, Abū ʿAwanah al-Isfarāʾīnī, Abū Bakr ibn Ziyād, and Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad ibn Abī Ḥamzah.