namely, as al-Dhahabī said: “How can it fly when it has not yet grown feathers?” Among the reports he assaulted is this very hadith recorded by al-Bukhārī; he exhausted his ingenuity in declaring it weak, advancing arguments that none of the early scholars—not even Ibn Ḥazm—had ever proposed. I have laid bare his ignorance, his denial, and his turning of facts on their head in detail in the “Addenda and Corrections” at the end of the first volume of the new edition of the series Al-Aḥādīth al-Ṣaḥīḥah, and I hope Allah will enable me, while fair-copying this treatise, to cite some of that material here, God willing.
So, O Shaykh, it may well be that this aggressor against the authentic hadiths—and those like him—are the bitter fruit of your own assaults on the sound Sunnah and its imams, and of your refusal to heed their rulings regarding authentication and weakening¹. Scholarly chaos has thus spread and pitched its tent among the ranks of the Ummah and its youth; each person now feels free to declare a report sound or weak according to his own whims and desires. Repent, then, to Allah—glorified and exalted be He—for this evil precedent and others like it, or else the sin will be upon you and upon all who follow you in it. Ask Him for a good ending, for the Messenger of Allah ﷺ said:
“A man may perform the deeds of the people of Paradise as far as people can see, yet he is one of the people of the Fire; and a man may perform the deeds of the people of the Fire as far as people can see, yet he is one of the people of Paradise.” [He also said:] “Actions are judged only by their conclusions.”
Agreed upon; the additional wording is from al-Bukhārī (Ẓilāl al-Jannah 1/96–97).