Abū Saʿd al-Samʿānī said: I heard the ḥāfiẓ Ismāʿīl b. Muḥammad b. al-Faḍl al-Taymī say, “I have read the Musnads—such as the Musnad of al-ʿAdanī and the Musnad of Aḥmad b. Manīʿ— and they are like rivers; but the Musnad of Abū Yaʿlā is like the sea into which those rivers flow.”
I say: He spoke the truth, especially with regard to the copy of his Musnad that the scholars of Isfahan possess, transmitted from him through Ibn al-Muqriʾ; it is extraordinarily large. This is unlike the Musnad that we have received through Abū ʿAmr b. Ḥamdān, for that one is abridged.
His narrations are found with a lofty, uninterrupted chain for Shaykh Fakhr al-Dīn b. al-Bukhārī in the Amālī al-Jawharī, and they also come to our children with an elevated authorization in the midst of the Juzʾ Maʾmūn. I have read the record of his audition dated 225 AH in Baghdad from Aḥmad b. Ḥātim al-Ṭawīl—the companion of Mālik—while Abū al-Walīd al-Ṭayālisī was still alive in Basra until 227 AH. Abū Yaʿlā lived on until part of 307 AH, and Abū al-Ḥusayn b. al-Munādī noted his death on the fourteenth of Jumādā al-Ūlā.
I say: With him the highest chains of transmission culminated, the hadith scholars crowded around him, and he lived ninety-seven years.
In that same year, 307 AH, several other leading figures also died: the ḥāfiẓ Zakariyyā al-Sājī; Abū ʿImrān Mūsā b. Sahl al-Jawnī—both shaykhs of hadith in Basra; the ḥāfiẓ Muḥammad b. Hārūn al-Ruyānī; the two shaykhs of Wāsiṭ, Jaʿfar b. Aḥmad b. Sinān and Maḥmūd b. Muḥammad; the muhaddith of Damascus, Jaʿfar b. Abī ʿĀṣim; the Musnad-holder of Baghdad, al-Ḥasan b. al-Ṭayyib al-Shujāʿī al-Balkhī; the long-lived Musnad-holder of Isfahan, Abū Jaʿfar Muḥammad b. ʿAlī b. Makhlad b. Farqad al-Isfahānī; the master of the reciters, Abū al-ʿAbbās Aḥmad b. Sahl al-Ashnānī; the ḥāfiẓ Abū Muḥammad ʿAbd Allāh b. ʿAlī b. al-Jārūd al-Naysābūrī in Mecca; and the muhaddith Abū Zakariyyā Yaḥyā b. Zakariyyā al-Naysābūrī—the companion of