and eighty years. I was taken to al-Shām in the year 266 AH when I was twelve years old (1). I then drew up a list of the shaykhs of mine who were called Aḥmad, and the tally reached one hundred and twenty (2). Later I visited him again in 339 AH, and he said, “I have sworn that I will not narrate.” Yet an hour later he declared: “So-and-so narrated to us,” and he proceeded to relate an account with its chain of transmission.

I do not know of him ever fabricating a ḥadith or piecing together a chain; the only irregularity in his case is that he transmitted from people who had died before his time (3).

Ibn ʿAsākir said: He narrated from Aḥmad ibn Shaybān, Aḥmad ibn al-Azhar, ʿĪsā ibn Aḥmad al-Balkhī, Muslim ibn al-Ḥajjāj (4), and Isḥāq ad-Dabarī.

Those who reported from him include Ibn Manda, al-Ḥākim, Abū Aḥmad ibn ʿAddī, Manṣūr ibn ʿAbd Allāh al-Khālidī, Abū ʿAbd al-Raḥmān as-Sulamī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Muḥammad as-Sarrāj, and ʿAlī ibn Muḥammad aṭ-Ṭirāzī (5).

Al-Ḥākim said: One day he said to me, “Do you not keep Allah in mind? Have you no sense of shame that restrains you from belittling the elders? Abū ʿAlī the ḥadith master came to me and objected to my narrating from Aḥmad ibn…"