He recited before: Hārūn ibn Mūsā al-Akhfash, Qunbul of Mecca, Isḥāq al-Khuzaʿī, Idrīs al-Ḥaddād, al-Ḥasan ibn al-ʿAbbās al-Rāzī, Ismāʿīl al-Naḥḥās, Muḥammad ibn Shādhān al-Jawharī, and many others whom I have listed in Tabaqāt al-Qurrāʾ ⦗1⦘.

He heard hadith from ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Kurbezān, Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥusayn al-Ḥunaynī, Isḥāq ibn Ibrāhīm al-Dabarī, and a number of other teachers.

He was an eminent imam—truthful, trustworthy, reserved, and of high standing.

Among those who recited to him were Aḥmad ibn Naṣr al-Shadhāʾī, his disciple Abū al-Faraj al-Shanbūdhī, Abū Aḥmad al-Sāmirī, al-Muʿāfā al-Jurayrī, Ibn Fūrak al-Qabbāb, Idrīs ibn ʿAlī al-Muʾaddib, Abū al-ʿAbbās al-Muṭṭawwiʿī, Ghazwān ibn al-Qāsim, and many others.

His transmitters in hadith include Abū Ṭāhir ibn Abī Hāshim, Abū Shaykh, and Abū Bakr ibn Shādhān; Abū ʿAmr al-Dānī relied upon him, as did the leading scholars, trusting his narrations and his precision. Nevertheless, he held the view that one may recite the anomalous variants (shawādh) that diverge from the consonantal outline of the imam’s codex, and for this the authorities criticised him, overreacted, and disciplined him ⦗2⦘. The issue is, in fact, a matter of dispute in general: they did not censure him at all for what he taught of the reading of Yaʿqūb ⦗3⦘ or of Abū Jaʿfar ⦗4⦘, but only for what went beyond the written outline of the muṣḥaf.