Was Abu 'Abd al-Rahman al-Sulami reliable in hadith?

The question of Abu 'Abd al-Rahman al-Sulami's standing in hadith, as the editor of Tabaqat al-Sufiyya, Nur al-Din Shurayba, gathers the views in his introduction. ¹ All the views are those of Sunni scholars; the museum presents them without choosing between them.

The editor says the earliest to accuse al-Sulami of fabrication was his contemporary Muhammad ibn Yusuf al-Qattan of Nishapur, who told al-Khatib al-Baghdadi that al-Sulami was unreliable, had heard only a little from al-Asamm, and after the death of al-Hakim Ibn al-Bayyi' narrated from al-Asamm Yahya ibn Ma'in's Ta'rikh and much else, "and he used to fabricate hadith for the Sufis". ¹

The editor quotes al-Khatib al-Baghdadi's comment that Abu 'Abd al-Rahman's standing among his townsmen was great, his place in his community high, and that he was moreover a careful hadith scholar; and the author of Tabaqat al-Shafi'iyya, who says al-Khatib's view is the correct one and that Abu 'Abd al-Rahman is reliable. ^{2 3}

The editor quotes al-Dhahabi that al-Sulami put questions to al-Daraqutni about the states of shaykhs and narrators "as one who knows", and that he is "not strong in hadith"; the editor considers this the best thing said of him. ³

The editor takes up al-Qattan's three charges: al-Asamm died in Nishapur in 346 AH when al-Sulami was twenty-one, and al-Sulami had begun writing from al-Sibghi in 333 AH at the age of eight, so how could he have heard little from al-Asamm? Why would he wait for Ibn al-Bayyi''s death in 405 AH to narrate, and why did no contemporary but al-Qattan accuse him? He concludes it was "a matter of envy". ² The charge of fabricating for the Sufis, and some contemporary researchers' suggestion that he may have put Sufi sayings into the masters' mouths, he calls exaggerated: his books, he says, contain sound, fair, weak and fabricated hadith, like those of others who wrote on hadith without devoting themselves to it. ³ He then quotes Abu Nu'aym's praise of him as one fully devoted to grounding and refining the Sufi way as the early generations had set it out, and al-Hakim's words: "If Abu 'Abd al-Rahman is not one of the substitutes (abdal), God has no saint on earth." ^{3 4}

Ibn al-Jawzi quotes al-Qattan's same words in Talbis Iblis with his chain through Abu Mansur al-Qazzaz from al-Khatib, in the course of his critique of al-Sulami's Haqa'iq al-Tafsir, in which, he says, al-Sulami interpreted the Qur'an by what occurred to the Sufis without grounding it in any principle of learning; Ibn al-Jawzi does not quote there the reply of al-Khatib that the editor of the Tabaqat reports. ^{5 2}