al-Madani—and he is reliable, as al-Tirmidhi attests.

Having established this, we must draw attention to an important point. The crux of the argument in this report is Anas’s statement that the practice in question “is a sunnah.” When a Companion rules that a matter is sunnah, his judgment carries the same weight as a hadith traced back to the Prophet, as is well known in the sciences of hadith and legal theory. Yet the wording that contains this decisive phrase was transmitted categorically only by ʿAbd Allāh ibn Jaʿfar, and— as noted earlier—there is unanimous agreement that he is weak.

As for the route that passes through Muḥammad ibn Jaʿfar, al-Tirmidhi did not quote its exact wording; he merely said, “and he related something to that effect.” In hadith methodology, such a statement does not guarantee identical wording.

We therefore searched for the precise text of Muḥammad ibn Jaʿfar ibn Abī Kathīr’s narration and found that he does not state the phrase with the same certainty as ʿAbd Allāh ibn Jaʿfar. This is likewise how Ismāʿīl ibn Isḥāq the judge records it in his book al-Ṣiyām (Fasting):

He said, “ʿĪsā ibn Mīnā narrated to us: Muḥammad ibn Jaʿfar ibn Abī Kathīr narrated to us, from Zayd ibn Aslam, from Ibn al-Munkadir, from Muḥammad ibn Kaʿb.”