Al-Hākim said: I heard Abū Bakr ibn Isḥāq recount:
“We left the study circle of Ibrāhīm al-Ḥarbī, and with us was a man much given to frivolity. He caught sight of a beardless youth, went up to him and said, ‘Peace be upon you,’ shook his hand, kissed his eyes and cheeks, and then declared, ‘Al-Dabarī in Ṣanʿāʾ narrated to us, through his chain of transmission, that the Messenger of Allah ﷺ said: “If one of you loves his brother, let him inform him.” (1)’
So I said to him, ‘Have you no shame—committing sodomy and lying in ḥadīth?’—meaning that he had fabricated a chain for that wording.”
Al-Ṣibghī died in Shaʿbān of the year 342 AH.
In that same year also died: the musnid of Hamadhān, Abū Jaʿfar Aḥmad ibn ʿUbayd al-Asadī; the shaykh of the Sufis Ibrāhīm ibn al-Mawlid; the musnid Abū al-Faḍl al-Ḥasan ibn Yaʿqūb al-Bukhārī; the musnid ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Ḥamdān al-Jallāb of Hamadhān; the eminent judge Abū al-Qāsim ʿAlī ibn Muḥammad ibn Abī al-Fahm al-Tanūkhī; and the shaykh of Marw, Imām Abū al-ʿAbbās al-Qāsim ibn al-Qāsim ibn Mahdī al-Sayyārī, grandson of Aḥmad ibn Sayyār.
He was corroborated by Ali ibn al-Aqmar in Sahih Muslim (no. 654/257) and in al-Nasa’i, 2/108‒109; the report is therefore authentic. Muslim reproduces the full wording: “Allah has prescribed for your Prophet—peace and blessings be upon him—the paths of guidance, and these are among those paths. If you prayed in your houses as this man who stays behind prays in his house, you would abandon the sunnah of your Prophet; and were you to abandon the sunnah of your Prophet, you would go astray. Whenever a man performs purification, perfects his wudu, and then sets out to one of these mosques, Allah records for him a good deed with every step, raises him one degree, and removes from him one sin. In our time no one stayed away from it except a hypocrite whose hypocrisy was well known; a sick man would be brought, supported between two men, until he was stood in the row.”
(1) I note, however, that while the chain cited here is weak, the wording of the hadith is sound. It is transmitted from al-Miqdam ibn Ma‘di Karib by Ahmad (4/130), al-Bukhari in al-Adab al-mufrad (no. 542), Abu Dawud (no. 5124), al-Tirmidhi (no. 2393), and al-Hakim (4/171) in the form: “When a man loves his brother, let him inform him that he loves him.” The isnad is authentic; Ibn Hibban (no. 2514) declared it sahih, and al-Tirmidhi graded it hasan sahih. It has an additional sound chain from Abu Dharr reported by Ahmad (5/145, 147), Ibn al-Mubarak, al-Zuhd (no. 712), and Ibn Wahb, al-Jami‘, p. 36.