Abū Bakr Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd Allah ibn Rīdhah, the merchant. After him, Abū al-Qāsim ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Abī Bakr al-Dhakwānī lived on, transmitting from al-Ṭabarānī by general licence; he died in 442 or 443 AH, while Ibn Rīdhah had predeceased him in 440 AH.

Among al-Ṭabarānī’s compositions are: al-Muʿjam al-Ṣaghīr, one volume in which he cites a single ḥadith from every teacher; al-Muʿjam al-Kabīr—a dictionary of the Companions, their biographies, and their narrations, though it omits the Musnad of Abū Hurayrah and does not encompass all the reports of the prolific Companions—running to eight volumes; and al-Muʿjam al-Awsaṭ, arranged according to his most frequently consulted teachers and containing what rare material he possessed from each of them, in five volumes.

Al-Ṭabarānī, so we have heard, used to say of the Awsaṭ: “This book is my very soul.”

Abū Bakr ibn Abī ʿAlī reported: My father asked Abū al-Qāsim al-Ṭabarānī how he had managed to collect so many ḥadith, and he replied, “I slept on reed mats, al-bawārī (1), for thirty years.”

Abū Nuʿaym said: “Al-Ṭabarānī first came to Isfahan in 290 AH, then left, and later returned and remained there as a traditionist for sixty years.”

Sulaymān ibn Ibrāhīm the ḥāfiẓ related that Abū Aḥmad al-ʿAssāl, the judge, said: “If I have heard twenty thousand ḥadith from al-Ṭabarānī, Abū Isḥāq ibn Ḥamzah has heard thirty thousand, and Abū al-Shaykh forty thousand—then our total is complete.”

I say: These were the shaykhs of Isfahan together with al-Ṭabarānī.

Abū Nuʿaym the ḥāfiẓ said: “I heard Aḥmad ibn Bundār say: ‘I entered al-ʿAskar in 288 AH, attended the session of ʿAbdān, and he came out to dictate; he then began to…’”