“A man once came to Madinah with slave-girls for sale and took lodging with ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿUmar. Among them was a girl who used to play. Another man arrived and began to bargain, but none of the girls pleased him. Ibn ʿUmar said, ‘Go to a man who will give you a better price than I.’ The buyer asked, ‘Who is he?’ Ibn ʿUmar replied, ‘ʿAbd Allāh ibn Jaʿfar.’ So he brought the girls before Ibn Jaʿfar, who told one of them, ‘Take the ʿūd (lute).’ She took it and sang, and he purchased her. The buyer then returned to Ibn ʿUmar … and the story continues.”

I have two comments on this report:

First: in the printed edition of Ibn Ḥazm’s Treatise (p. 100) the word ʿūd does not appear at all.

Second: the narration is found in al-Muḥallā, yet with uncertainty—hesitating between the word ʿūd and the word daff (frame drum). He cites it there (9/62–63) through the isnād of Ḥammād ibn Zayd, Ayyūb al-Sakhtiyānī, Hishām ibn Ḥassān, and Salamah ibn Kuhayl—each report merging into the next—all of them from Muḥammad ibn Sīrīn, that a man … and so on. Within it occurs: “She took”—Ayyūb says “the daff,” while Hishām says “the ʿūd”—“until Ibn ʿUmar thought he had looked upon it, whereupon he said, ‘Enough for the rest of today of the pipe of Satan!’” Then they haggled, and so forth. Ibn Ḥazm graded the chain authentic, and he is correct—provided the transmission up to those four named narrators is indeed sound, which is most likely the case.

The point is that Ayyūb and Hishām differed over which instrument the girl struck, and both are trustworthy. The former said it was a daff, the latter a ʿūd, and I am inclined to side with the first for two reasons: