and he went back repeating, “The slave has proved more generous than we are.” (1)

Sulaymān b. Isḥāq al-Jallāb said: I heard al-Ḥarbī say:

“The subject-headings are to be arranged on four strata: the stratum of the musnad (prophetic traditions with uninterrupted chains), the stratum of the Companions, the stratum of the Followers (tābiʿūn)—among whom the elders such as ʿAlqamah and al-Aswad are given precedence, followed by those who are younger—and, finally, the stratum of the Followers of the Followers (tābiʿ al-tābiʿīn), such as Sufyān, Mālik, al-Ḥasan b. Ṣāliḥ, ʿUbayd Allāh b. al-Ḥasan, Ibn Abī Laylā, Ibn Shubrumah, and al-Awzāʿī.

It is also related from Ibrāhīm al-Ḥarbī that he said: “People fall into four categories: a pleasant man who enhances his pleasantness; a pleasant man who makes himself detestable; a disagreeable man who tries to be pleasant; and a disagreeable man who makes himself even more disagreeable. The first is the ideal, the second can be tolerated. As for the disagreeable man who strives to be pleasant, I feel sorry for him; but from the disagreeable one who intensifies his disagreeableness I flee.”

Ibn Bashkuwāl, in his Akhbār Ibrāhīm al-Ḥarbī, reports: I copied from the book of Ibn ʿAṭṭāb that Ibrāhīm al-Ḥarbī was a righteous scholar. Word reached him that some of those who attended his gatherings were preferring him to Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal. He confronted them about it and they admitted it. He said, “You have wronged me by preferring me to a man whom I do not resemble, nor can I overtake in any of his states. I swear by Allah, I shall never again let you hear anything of knowledge from me; do not come to me after this day.”

Al-Ḥarbī died in Baghdad and was buried in his house on Monday, seven days before the end of Dhū al-Ḥijjah in the year 285 AH, during the caliphate of al-Muʿtaḍid.

Al-Masʿūdī said: The death of the ḥadith scholar and jurist al-Ḥarbī was in the quarter