the East who have no knowledge of the jurists’ positions. Anyone who claims that Mālik played the lute has fabricated a lie against him. I draw attention to this only because the material compiled on this subject by Abū ʿAbd al-Rahmān al-Sulamī and Muhammad ibn Tāhir al-Maqdisī contains accounts and reports that someone unfamiliar with scholarship and the lives of the early Muslims might suppose to be true.

“Shaykh Abū ʿAbd al-Rahmān”—may Allah have mercy on him—possessed goodness, asceticism, religious devotion, and commitment to Sufism that prompted him to collect every saying of the shaykhs and every report he could find that served his purpose. Thus, his books contain authentic reports and transmitted sayings that are beneficial in religious matters. They also contain unsound reports and objectionable statements that harm those without the knowledge to assess them. Some scholars expressed reservations about his transmission of reports. Indeed, when al-Bayhaqī narrated from him, he would say:

“Abū ʿAbd al-Rahmān related to us from his original record of what he had heard.”

Most of the accounts narrated by Abū al-Qāsim al-Qushayrī, author of al-Risāla (The Epistle), come from him, for among al-Qushayrī’s shaykhs he had made the most extensive collection of Sufi sayings.

“Muhammad ibn Tāhir” possessed considerable merit through his knowledge of hadith and its transmitters, and he was one of the hadith masters of his time. However, many later scholars—whether specialists in hadith, ascetics, jurists, or others—would, when writing on a subject, include whatever had been narrated concerning it, sound and unsound alike, without distinguishing between them. This can be found among those who compile works on particular subjects, such as the merits of months and particular times, and the merits of deeds