Contains 4,800 hadiths mostly on legal matters. Maktabat al-Kawthar, 1994. Matbaat al-Rabi, 1962. Transmission of Abu Hanifa's Musnads . Hilyat al-awliya covers mainly men of the first and second centuries, recounting hadith reports they transmitted alongside copious other examples of their piety.
Some mystics appear in the last two volumes, mostly from Iraq.
One of the polemical purposes of the book was evidently to establish the orthodoxy of the developing Sufi movement by showing that its ascetical forebears and leading lights were equally devoted to the transmission of hadith. Marlow, L. Al-'Arabiyya , vol. Abu al-Shuhbah , Muhammad ibn Muhammad. Abu Yusuf , Kitab al-kharaj , Trans. Ahmad b. Hanbal was founder of a legal school.