Yet which scholar—indeed, which rational person with even a modest grasp of Arabic style—could infer from that a preference for this report of al-Darāwardī over the one cited by al-Tirmidhī, when Abū Ḥātim never referred to the latter at all, neither explicitly nor implicitly? It is quite possible that he never encountered it in the first place, and in any case the Tirmidhī version is stronger and more authoritative than al-Darāwardī’s, as I shall show in the next section.

Accordingly, the Shaykh’s comment following Abū Ḥātim—“It is explicit that the report in al-Tirmidhī is outweighed and that the version negating the ruling is the preferred one”—is thereby invalidated.

Second: Al-Darāwardī’s wording in his narration, “It is not a Sunnah,” is objectionable, or at the very least irregular, for two reasons:

a) It contradicts the report of someone more trustworthy than he, namely Muḥammad ibn Jaʿfar ibn Abī Kathīr. Al-Tirmidhī declared him reliable—a judgment the Shaykh himself cites—and the critical Imams are unanimous on his reliability. Both al-Bukhārī and Muslim, together with all the compilers of the Sunan and others, relied on him; consequently, his report is the one given precedence in the estimation of