who authenticated it among the great ḥadith authorities down the centuries:

1. al-Bukhārī
2. Ibn Ḥibbān
3. al-Ismāʿīlī
4. Ibn al-Ṣalāḥ
5. al-Nawawī
6. Ibn Taymiyyah
7. Ibn al-Qayyim
8. Ibn Kathīr
9. Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī
10. Ibn al-Wazīr al-Ṣanʿānī
11. al-Sakhāwī
12. al-Amīr al-Ṣanʿānī

For further names, see my new book Daʿīf al-Adab al-Mufrad, where—while responding to Ibn ʿAbd al-Mannān in the introduction—I cite additional authorities whose names do not presently occur to me. Can any rational Muslim imagine that the dissenters, such as Ibn Ḥazm and those who followed him—none of whom is a ḥadith specialist—are correct and those imams are in error? “Are those who know equal to those who do not know?” (Q 39:9). “Surely in this is a reminder for whoever has a heart or lends an attentive ear and is present” (Q 50:37).

As for the other ḥadith among the six previously mentioned that Ibn Ḥazm declared weak, it is the third one (p. 55). He faulted it because its Successor narrator, Qays ibn Ḥubtar al-Nahshalī, was in his view unknown. This only betrays his narrow perspective and scant learning, for a number of early and later scholars deemed him trustworthy, and several narrators transmitted from him, as I showed there; a man of such standing cannot be classed as unknown.

Nor is Ibn Ḥazm’s ignorance here surprising: he failed to recognise a group of ḥadith masters whose fame and reliability shine like the midday sun—among them Imām al-Tirmidhī, author of the Sunan. Al-Ḥāfiẓ, in his biography of al-Tirmidhī in Tahdhīb, after quoting Ibn Ḥibbān and al-Khalīlī who declared him reliable, says: