The ḥadith master Ibn ʿAsākir said: al-Dhuhlī also transmitted it—Saʿīd ibn Abī Maryam informed us, Nāfiʿ ibn Yazīd informed us, from ʿUqayl, from al-Zuhrī.
Al-Ramādī related: “When Saʿīd ibn Abī Maryam narrated this report to me, I laughed. He asked, ‘Why are you laughing?’ I told him what ʿAlī ibn al-Madīnī had said—and what Aḥmad had written to him—namely: ‘This is a ḥadith for which Yūnus is the sole transmitter, yet here you are relating it from Nāfiʿ ibn Yazīd, from ʿUqayl.’ He replied, ‘Our Egyptian teachers have a special concern for the reports of al-Zuhrī.’
Among the words Aḥmad wrote to Ibn al-Madīnī were: ‘How can you deem it permissible to narrate from a man who reports from Maʿmar the ḥadith of Nabḥān, the freedman of Umm Salama?’ (1)
This account was transmitted by the ḥadith master Muḥammad ibn al-Muẓaffar, from ʿAbd Allāh ibn Muḥammad ibn Jaʿfar al-Qazwīnī, from al-Ramādī.
Ibrāhīm ibn Jābir, the ḥadith master, said: ‘I heard al-Ramādī relate the report of ʿUqayl from Ibn Shihāb and remark, “This is one of the matters in which al-Wāqidī has been treated unfairly.”’ (2)
Imam Ahmad’s report, cited by the author of al-Mubdi, is contradicted by other sound traditions on the subject. Al-Bukhari, for example, records in his Sahih, 9/294 (Book of Marriage, chapter: A woman’s looking at the Abyssinians and the like without suspicion), on the authority of al-Zuhri, from Urwa, from Aisha, who said: “I saw the Prophet (Allah bless him and grant him peace) shielding me with his cloak while I watched the Abyssinians playing in the mosque, until it was I who grew weary.”
The incident of watching the Abyssinians took place in the year of their arrival, the seventh year after the Hijra; Aisha was then sixteen years old, and this occurred after the revelation of the verse of hijab. Supporting the permissibility of a woman’s looking at an unrelated man (ajnabi) is the uninterrupted practice that women may go out to mosques, markets, and on journeys fully veiled so that men do not see them, whereas men have never been commanded to cover their faces so that women might not see them—clearly indicating a difference in the rulings for the two sexes.
The Prophet (Allah bless him and grant him peace) also instructed Fatima bint Qays—whose husband had issued her an irrevocable divorce while absent—to complete her waiting period in the house of Ibn Umm Maktum, telling her: “He is a blind man; you may lay aside your garments in his presence.” This sound hadith was transmitted by Malik, 2/580–581; al-Shafi‘i, al-Risala, §856; and Muslim, no. 1480.
(1) Tarikh Baghdad, 3/18.
(2) Tarikh Baghdad, 3/19.