ʿAbd Allāh ibn Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal said: Naṣr ibn ʿAlī narrated to me; ʿAlī ibn Jaʿfar ibn Muḥammad related to me; my brother Mūsā narrated from his father, from his father, from ʿAlī ibn Ḥusayn, from his father, from his grandfather—the Prophet ﷺ took the hands of Ḥasan and Ḥusayn and declared, “Whoever loves me, and loves these two, and their father and mother, will be with me in my rank on the Day of Resurrection.” (1)

I say: This ḥadīth is exceedingly anomalous.

ʿAbd Allāh ibn Aḥmad went on to say: When Naṣr reported it, al-Mutawakkil ordered that he be flogged one thousand lashes, but Jaʿfar ibn ʿAbd al-Wāḥid interceded, continually telling him, “The man is a follower of the Sunnah,” until he persuaded him to desist. Naṣr’s stipends had been suspended, and Mūsā restored them to him in full.

Abū Bakr al-Khaṭīb remarked afterward: “Al-Mutawakkil only commanded his beating because he supposed him to be a Rāfiḍī.” (2)

I say: Al-Mutawakkil was a Sunnī, yet he possessed a measure of nasb (anti-ʿAlid bias). Everyone in the chain of transmission is reliable except perhaps ʿAlī ibn Jaʿfar—he may not have preserved the exact wording. For all the Prophet’s ﷺ love of al-Ḥasan and al-Ḥusayn and his effort to spread their virtue, he would not place everyone who loves them on his own level in Paradise; more likely he said, “He will be with me in Paradise.”

Indeed, his ﷺ saying “A person is with those he loves” is mass-transmitted. (3)

As for Naṣr ibn ʿAlī, he is among the firmly established Imams of the Sunnah.