al-Tinnīsī, and other senior authorities whom his brother ʿAbd al-Raḥīm never met. Yet we found that al-Ṭabarānī, in his Muʿjam, never once cites ʿAbd al-Raḥīm under his proper name; he persisted in the slip and kept calling him “Aḥmad” under the letter alif. Those two brothers had a third sibling, the ḥāfiẓ Muḥammad ibn al-Barqī, author of a treatise on weak transmitters. He was the eldest of the trio and died in 249 AH. As for ʿAbd al-Raḥīm ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn al-Barqī—the one al-Ṭabarānī actually met but misnamed as Aḥmad—he died in 286 AH.

We have ourselves heard the Prophetic Sīrah through his route of transmission. The ḥadith master Abū al-ʿAbbās Aḥmad ibn Manṣūr al-Shīrāzī was asked about al-Ṭabarānī and replied, “I wrote down three hundred thousand hadiths from him. He is trustworthy, except that he once wrote from a shaykh in Egypt—two brothers—and erred in the man’s name, meaning the two sons of al-Barqī.”

Abū ʿAbd Allāh al-Ḥākim reports: “I found the ḥāfiẓ Abū ʿAlī al-Naysābūrī harbouring a poor opinion of Abū al-Qāsim al-Lakhmī. I asked him why. He said, ‘We were gathered at the door of Abū Khalīfah, and I mentioned to him the chains for the hadith, “I have been commanded to prostrate upon seven body parts” (1). I asked him, ‘Does Shuʿbah preserve it from ʿAbd al-Malik ibn Maysarah, from Ṭāwūs, from Ibn ʿAbbās?’ He replied, ‘Yes—Ghondar and Ibn Abī ʿAdī transmitted it.’ I asked, ‘Which of the two?’ He said, ‘ʿAbd Allāh ibn Aḥmad narrated it to us, from his father, from both of them.’ At that point I suspected him, for no one has transmitted it from Shuʿbah except ʿUthmān ibn ʿUmar.’

I said, ‘This is undue stringency toward a ḥāfiẓ who is a definitive authority.’

The ḥadith master Ḍiyāʾ al-Dīn al-Maqdisī commented: ‘Al-Ṭabarānī slipped in that particular discussion, but when he compiled the hadith of Shuʿbah he narrated it only through ʿUthmān ibn ʿUmar.’