—recorded by al-Nasāʾī through Abū Kurayb, and by the Qazwīnī through Ibn al-Ṣabbāḥ; both of them transmit from Abū Bakr.

ʿAbd al-Ḥāfiẓ ibn Badrān and Yūsuf ibn Aḥmad informed us, saying: Mūsā ibn ʿAbd al-Qādir informed us; Saʿīd ibn Aḥmad ibn al-Bannāʾ informed us; ʿAlī ibn Aḥmad ibn al-Busrī informed us; Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Dhahabī narrated to us; Yaḥyā ibn Muḥammad narrated to us; Luwayn narrated to us; Abū al-Aḥwaṣ narrated to us, from Abū Isḥāq, from Burayd ibn Abī Maryam, from Anas ibn Mālik, who said:

The Messenger of Allah ﷺ said, “Whoever asks Allah for Paradise three times, Paradise will say, ‘O Allah, admit him to Paradise.’ And whoever seeks refuge with Allah from the Fire, the Fire will say, ‘O Allah, protect him from the Fire.’” (1)

Aḥmad ibn ʿAbdah said: I heard Abū Dāwūd al-Ṭayālisī say, “We found the transmission of hadith concentrated in four men: al-Zuhrī, Qatādah, Abū Isḥāq, and al-Aʿmash. Qatādah was the most knowledgeable concerning the variant wordings, al-Zuhrī the most knowledgeable of the chains of transmission, Abū Isḥāq the most knowledgeable of the hadith of ʿAlī and Ibn Masʿūd, and al-Aʿmash possessed something of all of that. Yet none of these men had memorised more than two thousand hadiths apiece.”