I would have travelled to Jarīr ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd in Rayy; some of our companions went, but I was unable to set out, for I had nothing.

Ibn Ibn Ḥātim reported—from his father, from Ḥarmalah—that he said: “I heard al-Shāfiʿī say, ‘Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal promised me that he would come to Egypt.’”

Ibn Abī Ḥātim commented: “It seems that the lightness of his purse kept him from fulfilling that promise.”

Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal journeyed through many lands and regions, hearing ḥadīth from the scholars of his era; they revered and honored him even while he was their student. Our teacher has listed, in his Tahdhīb (1), the names of those teachers—arranged alphabetically—as well as the names of those who transmitted from him.

Al-Ḥāfiẓ Abū Bakr al-Bayhaqī, after mentioning a number of Imām Aḥmad’s teachers, said: “In his Musnad and elsewhere Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal narrates copiously from al-Shāfiʿī. He borrowed from him several of his remarks on the genealogies of Quraysh and took from him jurisprudential matters that are well known. When Aḥmad died they found among his effects both of al-Shāfiʿī’s treatises, the ‘Old’ and the ‘New’ (2).”

I (the author) say: The aḥādīth that Imām Aḥmad related from al-Shāfiʿī have been collected separately; they do not reach twenty in number. Among the finest of what we have transmitted is the report of Imām Aḥmad (3), from Imām al-Shāfiʿī, from Imām Mālik ibn Anas, from al-Zuhrī, from ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Kaʿb ibn Mālik, from his father, who said that the Messenger of Allah ﷺ declared:
“The soul of the believer is a bird that feeds on the trees of Paradise until Allah returns it to its body on the day He resurrects it.” (4)

When al-Shāfiʿī met him on his second journey to Baghdad, after the year 190 AH—Aḥmad was then a little over thirty—he said to him, “O Abū ʿAbd Allāh, when a ḥadīth is authenticated in your view, inform me so that I may act upon it, whether its transmitter be from the Ḥijāz, Syria, Iraq, or Yemen.” By this he meant that he did not share the view of the jurists of the Ḥijāz who accepted only the reports of Ḥijāzīs and ranked the aḥādīth of others alongside the scriptures of the People of the Book. Al-Shāfiʿī’s words manifest his veneration and respect for Aḥmad, indicating that he deferred to him when Aḥmad graded a report as sound or weak.

Such was Imām Aḥmad’s standing among the imāms and scholars, as will be seen in their praises of him and their acknowledgment of his rank.