Abu Manṣūr al-Qazzāz informed us, Abū Bakr al-Khaṭīb narrated to us, al-Azharī narrated to us, Aḥmad b. ʾIbrāhīm b. al-Ḥasan narrated to us, ʿAbdullah b. Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal narrated to us, saying: Abū Turāb al-Nakhshabī came to my father (Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal) when he started saying, “so-and-so is weak and so-and-so is trustworthy.”

Abū Turāb said, “O’ Shaykh, do not backbite the scholars.”

My father turned to him and said: “Woe to you! This is sincere advice, this is not backbiting.”

Yaḥya b. ʿAlī al-Mudabbir informed us, Aḥmad b. ʿAlī b. Thābit narrated to us, Riḍwān b. Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan al-Dinawārī narrated to us, I heard Aḥmad b. Muḥammad b. ʿAbdullah al-Naysābūrī say, I heard Abū al-Ḥasan ʿAlī b. Muḥammad al-Bukharī say, I heard Muḥammad b. al-Fadl al-ʿAbbāsī say: We were with ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Abī Ḥātim while he was reading to us his book Al-Jarḥ wa-al-Taʿdīl. He said, “I am making clear the conditions of the people of knowledge: who among them was reliable and who was not.”

Yūsuf b. al-Ḥusayn said to him: “I am ashamed for you O’ Abū Muḥammad! How many of these people have settled in Paradise a hundred or two hundred years ago, while you mention them and backbite them upon the face of the earth?”

ʿAbd al-Raḥmān wept and said: “O’ Abū Yaʿqūb, had I heard this statement before I compiled this book, I would not have compiled it.”

I (Ibn al-Jawzī) say:

May Allāh pardon Ibn Abī Ḥātim. Had he been a faqīh, he would have refuted him (Yūsuf b. al-Ḥusayn) just as Imām Aḥmad refuted Abū Turāb. Were it not for al-Jarḥ wa-al-Taʿdīl, how would the authentic be distinguished from the inauthentic? Likewise, those people being in Paradise does not prevent us from mentioning them with what was with them, and to name that ‘backbiting’ is evil speech. Additionally, how can one who does not even understand al-Jarḥ wa-al-Taʿdīl have his words given any weight? Rather, Yūsuf should busy himself with the strange tales that are told about people like him [i.e., the strange tales of the ṣūfiyyah, since he was a ṣūfī].