He said, “I am not aware of a single pulpit among the pulpits of Islam that I have not mounted in order to hear hadith.”

I comment: The man is clearly exaggerating, for he never entered al-Andalus or the Maghrib. I think he only meant the pulpits where hadith transmission was actually taking place.

He (al-Ḥākim) also said: I heard Abū Isḥāq al-Muzakkī report that he heard Muḥammad ibn al-Musayyab say, “I used to walk about in Egypt with one hundred booklets tucked inside my sleeve, each booklet containing one thousand hadiths.”

I remark: This points to the extraordinary minuteness of his handwriting; otherwise, a thousand hadiths written in a clearly spaced script would fill a whole volume, and a sleeve would barely manage, with difficulty, to hold four such volumes.

Al-Ḥākim added: I heard Abū ʿAlī the ḥāfiẓ say, “Muḥammad ibn al-Musayyab would roam the streets of Egypt with one hundred thousand hadiths in his sleeve. His fascicles were tiny, penned in an exceptionally fine hand; each fascicle contained one thousand precisely numbered hadiths, and this became a well-known feature of his life.”

I also heard Abū ʿUmar al-Musayyab ibn Muḥammad say, “My father died on Saturday, the fifteenth of Jumādā al-Ūlā in the year 315 AH, at the age of ninety-two.”

I add: In that same year there also passed away the hadith scholar of Damascus, Abū al-Ḥasan Muḥammad ibn al-Fayḍ al-Ghassānī, aged ninety-six; the hadith scholar of Kūfa, Abū Jaʿfar Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥusayn al-Khathʿamī al-Ashnānī; al-Akhfash the Younger, ʿAlī ibn Sulaymān the grammarian of Baghdad; and the hadith-scholar-judge Abū al-Qāsim ʿAbd Allāh ibn Muḥammad ibn Jaʿfar al-Qazwīnī.