so I set out for Marw, and in Marw al-Rūdh I heard (hadith) from Muḥammad ibn Hishām—the companion of Hushaym—when news reached us that Qutaybah had passed away.

Al-Ḥāfiẓ Abū ʿAlī al-Naysābūrī said, “I have never seen anyone like Ibn Khuzaymah.”

I commented, “He can make such a statement even though he met al-Nasāʾī.”

Abū Aḥmad Ḥusaynk said: I heard the Imām of the Imāms, Abū Bakr, relate from ʿAlī ibn Khushram, from Ibn Rāhwayh, that he said, “I know 70,000 hadiths by heart.”

I asked Ibn Khuzaymah, “How many has the shaykh memorised?”

He tapped me on the head and said, “How inquisitive you are!” Then he added, “My son, I have never set black ink on white paper except while fully aware of what I was recording.”

Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥāfiẓ said, “Ibn Khuzaymah could recall the jurisprudential narrations from his own works as flawlessly as a Qur’an reciter remembers a sūrah.”

Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥasan ibn ʿAlī narrated to us, ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿUmar narrated to us, Abū’l-Waqt narrated to us, Shaykh al-Islām Abū Ismāʿīl al-Anṣārī (1) narrated to us, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad ibn Ṣāliḥ narrated to us, my father narrated to us, Abū Ḥātim ibn Ḥibbān al-Tamīmī said:

“I have never encountered on the face of the earth anyone who safeguards the discipline of the Sunan and memorises their exact authentic wordings together with their additional material—so that it is as though the entire corpus of Sunan were before his very eyes—except Muḥammad ibn Isḥāq ibn Khuzaymah alone.”

Abū’l-Ḥasan al-Dāraquṭnī said, “Ibn Khuzaymah was an imam, utterly reliable, without equal.”

Abū Bishr al-Qaṭṭān recounted: A neighbour of Ibn Khuzaymah—himself a man of learning—saw in a dream what looked like a tablet