and also Ibn ʿUbayd al-ʿAskari, Abū Bakr al-Ismaʿili, and others.

al-Dāraqutnī said: “Reliable.”

I say: He died in Shawwal, in the year 298 AH.

22 – Ibn Abī Suwayd, Muḥammad ibn ʿUthmān al-Baṣrī

The shaykh, ḥadith scholar, and long-lived Abū ʿUthmān Muḥammad ibn ʿUthmān ibn Abī Suwayd al-Baṣrī, known as al-Darrāʿ.

He narrated from ʿUthmān ibn al-Haytham, al-Qaʿnabi, Saʿīd ibn Salām al-ʿAṭṭār, Muslim ibn Ibrāhīm, Bakkār al-Sīrīnī, and their contemporaries.

Those who narrated from him include al-Ṭabarānī, Abū Aḥmad ibn ʿAdī, the judge Abū Ṭāhir al-Dhuhlī, and others.

Ibn ʿAdī declared him weak (1) and said: “His books were afflicted, so matters became confused for him. I hope he did not intentionally lie.”

No one denies that he did meet those shaykhs, yet he related from trustworthy transmitters reports for which he has no corroboration.

People would read to him from a copy attributed to him material that was not from his own narrations—reports from men he claimed to have met but in fact had not—and chains of transmission would be inverted before him, and he would nonetheless approve them.

Ibn ʿAdī then said: “I heard Abū Khalīfah commend him, noting that he had listened to ḥadith alongside him” (2).

Hamzah ibn Yūsuf asked al-Dāraqutnī about him, and he replied: “Weak.”

I say: He died before 300 AH, at a little over ninety years of age.