travel, not beforehand out of apprehension regarding the “day of doubt.”

With this, the Shaykh’s final prop by which he sought to undermine the hadith collapses, and it becomes plain to anyone with sound vision that the report is authentic in the precise wording transmitted by al-Tirmidhi—the very text with which the Shaykh opened his article.

What is even more astonishing is that the Shaykh himself states in his treatise al-Taʿaqqub, p. 21, that someone of his standing has no mandate to rule on the soundness or weakness of hadiths; yet in this same article he boldly declares unsound a narration that the scholars—from al-Tirmidhi down to Ibn al-Qayyim—have unanimously authenticated, a judgment fully corroborated by the established principles of hadith criticism.