Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad al-Ḥalabī, Muḥammad ibn Ibrāhīm the Grammarian, Sulaymān ibn Qudāmah the Judge and his brother Dāwūd, ʿAbd al-Munʿim ibn ʿAbd al-Laṭīf, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn ʿUmar, ʿĪsā ibn Abī Muḥammad, ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd ibn Aḥmad, Ibrāhīm ibn Ṣadaqah, and ʿĪsā ibn Ḥamd—all of them said:
“ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿUmar informed us (ḥ).”
Likewise, Aḥmad ibn Isḥāq al-Abarqūhī told us, and Zakariyyā ibn Ḥassān conveyed to us; they said:
“Abū al-Waqt al-Sijzī informed us; Umm al-Faḍl Bībā bint ʿAbd al-Ṣamad informed us; ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad al-Anṣārī informed us; ʿAbd Allāh ibn Muḥammad al-Baghawī informed us; Muṣʿab ibn ʿAbd Allāh narrated to us; Mālik related to me, from Nāfiʿ, from Ibn ʿUmar, from ʿĀʾishah:
That the Messenger of Allah ﷺ said, “al-Walāʾ (the post-emancipation bond of allegiance) belongs to the one who set the slave free.” (1)
Abū al-ʿAbbās Aḥmad ibn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Ḥusaynī and Aḥmad ibn
Highly informative, broadly versed in the sciences, cheerful in countenance and commendably modest; I narrated many reports from him in Baalbek and in Damascus. He died in the year 107 AH.
Muʿjam al-Shuyukh, fol. 99/2.
The Yunini recension of Sahih al-Bukhari is the most reliable master-copy available. Al-Yunini held public sessions in Damascus for the oral transmission of Sahih al-Bukhari in the presence of the great grammarian Ibn Malik al-Taʾi, together with a number of other scholars. From these sessions he collated authoritative base manuscripts. During them al-Yunini acted as the senior reader who recited the text, whereas Ibn Malik—although more than twenty years older—attended as a student, hearing and narrating the work.
Such an arrangement pertains to the field of isnad (transmission): early righteous scholars customarily received learning from trustworthy shaykhs even when the listener was older than the teacher. In the same gatherings al-Yunini himself studied under Ibn Malik, benefiting from him in matters of linguistic precision, grammatical explanation and textual correction.
The authoritative exemplars that al-Hafiz al-Yunini and his colleagues used for collation are listed in his certificate of audition (thabat al-samaʿ), which al-Qastallani reproduces in his commentary and which the editors of the Royal Egyptian edition (Cairo, 1311–1313 AH) likewise incorporated.
(1) Chain of transmission: sound (sahih). The hadith appears in al-Muwattaʾ, 2/586, Book of Divorce, chapter “Options (in contracts)”; in al-Bukhari, 5/138, Book of Manumission, chapter “Permissible Conditions for a Mukatab”; and in Muslim (no. 1504), Book of Manumission, chapter “Loyalty (walaʾ) belongs only to the emancipator.”