and that the Messenger of Allah ﷺ asked him to stay on, so he remained at his command. Al-Dhahabī comments, “Had this been the case, the Prophet would not have required al-ʿAbbās to pay a ransom on the Day of Badr.”[1]
Another example is the story ascribed to ʿĀʾishah in which she is said to have boasted of her father’s pre-Islamic wealth, allegedly “one million uqiyyahs…” and so forth. Al-Dhahabī remarks, “Its isnād is somewhat soft.” He considered one of the two occurrences of the word alf (“thousand”) in the phrase “a million” to be spurious; the correct figure would then be a single thousand uqiyyahs, equivalent to forty thousand dirhams—a sum that a merchant might rightly take pride in, and he had already spent his wealth in the path of Allah. When he emigrated, only six thousand dirhams remained with him and he took them along; a fortune of a million uqiyyahs could belong only to a great sovereign.[2]
Instances of this kind abound in Al-Dhahabī’s book, disproving the opinion that the hadith critics confined their assessment to the isnād and paid no heed to the text itself.
- Partisanship and Fairness in Criticism
Al-Dhahabī’s method was to cite the views of both supporters and detractors of the person he was profiling, thereby offering a complete picture. This trait pervades his work and appears in every entry, whereas others—such as al-Subkī (d. 771 AH)—contented themselves with recording words of praise alone.
Moreover, Al-Dhahabī devoted entries to a large number of his own contemporaries, especially in his major Muʿjam and in his separate dictionary of hadith scholars. Inevitably he criticized some of them, which did not sit well with certain individuals. Some were pained by his remarks, and a few became intensely angry—such as Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad ibn Buṣkhān, the Qur’an reciter who died in 743 AH. Al-Dhahabī wrote a biography of him and included some censure. In retaliation, Ibn Buṣkhān scrawled in thick letters on the very page written in Al-Dhahabī’s hand, pouring abuse on him so virulent that most of Al-Dhahabī’s writing became unreadable.[3]