What carries greater weight in my judgment is that he remains unknown; this is exactly what al-Ḥāfiẓ meant when he labeled him “mastūr” (obscure). Yet such obscurity, for us as well as for the Shaykh, does not prevent us from citing his report as corroborative evidence, for that is the rule established in the science of hadith.

Consider the Shaykh al-Ḥabashī’s own words in a comparable context. In al-Taʿqub, p. 5, he writes: “Obscurity (jahālah) is of the type that, when its narrator is followed by another of equal or higher rank, the weakness is remedied and his report is deemed acceptable (ḥasan).”

On that basis, the hadith is acceptable to the Shaykh—or, at the very least, it ought to be—for it reaches us through an additional route, that of Anas. Even were he to concede that this second isnād is weak, the narration would still be strengthened; how much more so now that we have demonstrated it to be sound.

Indeed, to avoid contradicting the very principles he employed when authenticating other narrations in his aforementioned treatise, the Shaykh is obliged to declare this isnād sound in and of itself, since none of its transmitters is open to question save Manṣūr.