He was reserved, devout, and truthful—wholly devoted to hadith, firmly committed to the Sunnah, and keen-sighted with regard to the transmitters. He never busied himself with anything other than hadith. In his father’s Musnad he inserted many additional reports, clearly drawn from the lofty chains of his own teachers. Yet he neither refined the arrangement of the Musnad nor rendered it easy to consult; the book therefore still requires editing and re-ordering.

A number of scholars transmitted the Musnad from him. The hadith master Abū Nuʿaym, for instance, heard a large portion of it from Abū ʿAlī ibn al-Ṣawwāf and the bulk of it from Abū Bakr al-Qaṭīʿī, who himself narrated it on several occasions. Abū ʿAbd Allāh al-Ḥākim and others read the work to al-Qaṭīʿī. Al-Qaṭīʿī, however, was not one of the champions of hadith, nor was he a meticulous critic; he merely conveyed what he had received—provided he was free of slips in some of the chains and texts.

The last person to transmit the Musnad from al-Qaṭīʿī in its entirety—apart from a small section that had dropped out of the manuscripts—was the preacher Shaykh Abū ʿAlī ibn al-Mudhahhib. He, too, was not a hadith specialist; he was called upon solely so that this book could be auditioned, and thus he narrated it in general. Ten years after him lived Shaykh Abū Muḥammad al-Jawharī, the final student of al-Qaṭīʿī. He alone preserved from him several high-level fascicles, including the audition of the Musnad of the Ten Companions from the larger Musnad.

Subsequently, the last of Ibn al-Mudhahhib’s pupils to teach the entire book was the distinguished shaykh and chief scribe, Abū al-Qāsim Hibat Allāh ibn Muḥammad al-Shaybānī ibn al-Ḥuṣayn—a venerable musnid through whom the loftiest chain of transmission in Baghdad, the dome of Islam, converged. Yet he, too, lacked real expertise in this discipline. Many students took the book from him, among them: Abū Muḥammad ibn al-Khassāb, the foremost grammarian; the hadith master Abū al-Faḍl ibn Nāṣir; the polymath Imām Abū al-Faraj ibn al-Jawzī; the eminent hadith specialist Abū Mūsā al-Madīnī; the erudite Abū al-ʿAlāʾ al-ʿAṭṭār, Shaykh of Hamadhān; the great hadith master Abū al-Qāsim ibn ʿAsākir; the judge Abū al-Fatḥ ibn al-Mandāʾī al-Wāsiṭī; Shaykh ʿAbd Allāh ibn Abī al-Majd al-Ḥarbī; al-Mubārak ibn al-Maʿṭūsh; and Shaykh al-Mubārak Ḥanbal ibn ʿAbd Allāh.