from among you; for I can no longer hear, my eyesight has grown dim, the time of departure is upon me, and the appointed term has run its course. No more than a month—or even less—had passed before his sight was gone altogether, the journeys to him ceased, and the visitors from distant lands dispersed. His situation then came to this: whenever someone placed a pen in his hand he would realize that they wanted a narration, so he would say, “Rabīʿ narrated to us.” He had memorized fourteen hadiths and seven anecdotes; these he would relate, and he remained in this pitiable state until he died. (1)
I read, in the handwriting of Abū ʿAlī the ḥāfiẓ, a note urging Abū al-ʿAbbās al-Aṣamm to repudiate the hadiths that had been inserted into his collection—among them the hadith of al-Ṣaghānī, from ʿAlī ibn Ḥakīm, from Ḥumayd ibn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, from Hishām ibn ʿUrwah, namely the hadith on “the withdrawal of knowledge” (2); and the hadith of Aḥmad ibn Shaybān, from Ibn ʿUyaynah, from al-Zuhrī, from Sālim, from his father: “The Messenger of Allah ﷺ dispatched a detachment…” (3)
(1) The complete report is found in Al-Ansab, vol. 1, pp. 296–297; the passages placed between brackets in the present work are taken from that source.
(2) The hadith on the withdrawal of knowledge is related by al-Bukhari (no. 100, Book of Knowledge, chapter “How knowledge is withdrawn”) and Muslim (no. 2673, Book of Knowledge, chapter “The removal and withdrawal of knowledge”) through several chains from Hisham b. Urwa, from his father, from Abd Allah b. Amr b. al-As, who said: “I heard the Messenger of Allah say: ‘Allah does not take away knowledge by snatching it from the servants, but He takes away knowledge by taking away the scholars. When no scholar remains, people will take ignorant persons as leaders; they will be asked and will give fatwas without knowledge, so they will go astray and lead others astray.’” Ibn Hajar remarks in Fath al-Bari that this hadith is well-known from Hisham b. Urwa: more than seventy transmitters conveyed it from him in the Two Sacred Cities, the two Iraqs, Syria, Khurasan, Egypt and elsewhere. Others corroborated his narration from his father, among them Abu al-Aswad al-Madani (Bukhari 7317; Muslim 2673 [14]), al-Zuhri (al-Nasa’i), Yahya b. Abi Kathir (Sahih Abi Awana), and, on the authority of Abd Allah b. Amr, Umar b. al-Hakam b. Thawban (Muslim 2673).
(3) The hadith concerning the Prophet’s dispatch of a military detachment is reported by Malik in the Muwatta, 2/450 (Book of Jihad, chapter “General rulings on booty”); by Ahmad, 2/62; and by al-Bukhari (no. 3134) and Muslim (no. 1749) through Nafiʿ, from Ibn Umar: “The Messenger of Allah sent a detachment that included Abd Allah b. Umar toward Najd. They captured many camels; each man’s share came to twelve—or eleven—camels, and they were granted an extra camel each as a special allotment.” Al-Bukhari (no. 4338) also records it via Abu al-Nuʿman, from Hammad, from Ayyub, from Nafiʿ; Muslim narrates it through al-Layth b. Saʿd, from Nafiʿ; and he transmits it as well through other chains from ʿUbayd …