; and Muhammad ibn Maʿmar al-Qaysi; Ibrahim ibn Saʿid al-Jawhari; Nasr ibn ʿAli al-Jahzami; Muhammad ibn ʿAbd Allah ibn Baziʿ; Salih ibn Mismar al-Marwazi; Saʿid ibn Yahya al-Umawi; Nasr ibn ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Awdi; ʿAbd al-Hamid ibn Bayan al-Sukkari; Ahmad ibn Abi Surayj al-Razi; al-Hasan ibn al-Sabbah al-Bazzar; Abu ʿAmmar al-Husayn ibn Hurayth—and many others besides them.
He spent the closing years of his life settled in Baghdad.
He was counted among the foremost imams of independent juridical reasoning (ijtihad).
Among those who narrated from him were: Abu Shuʿayb ʿAbd Allah ibn al-Hasan al-Harrani—who was older than he—Abu al-Qasim al-Tabarani, Ahmad ibn Kamil the judge, Abu Bakr al-Shafiʿi, Abu Ahmad ibn ʿAdi, Mukhlid ibn Jaʿfar al-Baqurhi, the judge Abu Muhammad ibn Zabr, Ahmad ibn al-Qasim al-Khasshab, Abu ʿAmr Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Hamdan, Abu Jaʿfar Ahmad ibn ʿAli al-Katib, ʿAbd al-Ghaffar ibn ʿUbayd Allah al-Hudayni, Abu al-Mufaddal Muhammad ibn ʿAbd Allah al-Shaybani, al-Muʿalla ibn Saʿid, and a great many others.
Abu Saʿid ibn Yunus said: “Muhammad ibn Jarir was from the people of Amul; he wrote in Egypt, then returned to Baghdad and composed fine works that testify to the breadth of his knowledge.”
Al-Khatib said (1): “Muhammad ibn Jarir ibn Yazid ibn Kathir ibn Ghalib was one of the leading scholars; his rulings were relied upon and people referred to his opinion because of his learning and merit. He had gathered of the sciences what none of his contemporaries combined. He was a memorizer of the Book of Allah, knowledgeable of the variant readings, insightful regarding meanings, a jurist in the rulings of the Quran, learned in the sunnah and its pathways—its sound and its weak, its abrogating and abrogated—aware of the statements of the Companions and Followers, and well-versed in people’s history and chronicles. He is the author of the famous book on (