hadith scholars, and I was on the verge of travelling to Suwayd. He said, “Stop him and make sure of him: did you really hear this from ʿĪsā ibn Yūnus?”

So I went to Suwayd and questioned him. He replied, “ʿĪsā ibn Yūnus narrated to us, from Ḥarīz ibn ʿUthmān, from ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Jubayr ibn Nufayr, from his father, from ʿAwf ibn Mālik, from the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, who said: ‘This community will split into some seventy-odd sects; the worst of them are a people who measure matters by opinion—by it they declare the unlawful lawful and the lawful unlawful.’ (1)”

After he had recited it to me, I confronted Suwayd about the matter, and a lengthy discussion ensued between us.

Ibn ʿAdī said: “This report is known only through Nuʿaym ibn Ḥammād, and because of him people spoke against it. Later it was narrated by a man from Khurasan named al-Ḥakam ibn al-Mubārak, whose kunyah is Abū Ṣāliḥ al-Khawāstī (2), and it is said that there is no harm in him. Then a group of weak transmitters—well-known for pilfering hadith—stole it, among them ʿAbd al-Wahhāb ibn al-Ḍaḥḥāk, al-Naḍr ibn Ṭāhir, and their third was Suwayd al-Anbārī.

Suwayd has many narrations from his teachers; he even transmitted Mālik’s Muwaṭṭaʾ, though it is said he heard it from behind a wall, so he was deemed weak in what he narrated from Mālik as well, and overall he inclines toward weakness.

Abū Bakr al-Ismāʿīlī said: “I have reservations about Suwayd on account of his tadlīs, as well as what has been mentioned about him concerning the ḥadith of ʿĪsā ibn Yūnus—a report that, they say, Nuʿaym alone transmitted.” (3)