and he would relate to me two hadiths, or three, or even more than that. I kept to this arrangement until the inquisitor who had put him to the test died, and someone who followed the creed of the Sunnah took charge. Ahmad then emerged openly, his leadership rose to prominence, and people wore out their camels’ flanks travelling to him. He acknowledged the right I had earned through my patience: whenever I came to his circle he would make room for me and recount my story to the hadith students. He would hand the written reports to me directly (1), read them aloud to me, and have me read them back to him; I also fell ill in a group while with him—he narrated that incident at length.

Al-Qasim ibn Bashkuwal transmitted this account in one of his works, and I copied it from the handwriting of our shaykh, Abu al-Walid ibn al-Hajj, yet it is rejected. Ibn Makhlad did not reach Imam Ahmad until after 230 AH, and Ahmad had already stopped narrating midway through the year 228; from then until his death he did not transmit a single hadith. When the ordeal ended in 232, al-Wathiq died, al-Mutawakkil became caliph, and he ordered the hadith scholars to circulate traditions concerning the beatific vision (2) and other topics, Imam Ahmad still refused to narrate and remained firm in that decision. All he did was review knowledge, transmitted reports, the names of narrators, and jurisprudence. Had Baqi managed to hear three hundred hadiths from him, he would have embellished his (Musnad) with them and prided himself on that transmission.

I possess two volumes of the (Musnad), and not a single word in them is from Ahmad.

After this comes a story even more questionable, in which he says: “I copied from the handwriting of his grandson, ʿAbd al-Rahman…”