Hamzah ibn Muhammad ibn Tahir said: “I heard Ibn Shahin relate:

‘Ibn al-Muzaffar (1) was with us in the session of Judge al-Mahamili. He turned to me and said, “Abu Hafs, the only thing we lack of Ibn Saʿid (2) is to see him with our own eyes (3).”’

He meant that al-Mahamili equalled Ibn Saʿid in reliability and in the loftiness of his chains of transmission.

Al-Suri reported—on the authority of Ibn Jamiʿ—saying: “Al-Mahamili narrates from Muhammad ibn ʿAmr ibn Abi Madʿur, and Muhammad ibn Makhlad al-ʿAttar also narrates from Muhammad ibn ʿAmr ibn Abi Madʿur; the two narrators are first cousins. Yet al-Mahamili did not transmit from any teacher of Ibn Makhlad, nor did Ibn Makhlad transmit from any teacher of al-Mahamili.”

Al-Mahamili conducted a number of dictation gatherings. He held one such session on the twelfth of Rabiʿ al-Akhar in the year 330 AH, after which he fell ill and died eleven days later (4).

In that same year there also died: the Isfahani traditionist Abu Jaʿfar Muhammad ibn ʿUmar ibn Hafs al-Jurjiri; the musnid of Nishapur, Abu Hamid Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Yahya ibn Bilal al-Khushshab; the Damascene judge and muhaddith Zakariyya ibn Ahmad, son of the ḥāfiẓ Yahya ibn Musa Khat al-Balkhi; the Homs-based traditionist Abu Hashim ʿAbd al-Ghafir ibn Salamah al-Himsi, who passed away in his nineties; the Sufi shaykh Abu Yaʿqub Ishaq ibn Muhammad al-Nahrajuri; and the leading Shafiʿi scholar Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn ʿAbd Allah al-Sayrafi al-Baghdadi.