Al-Ṭabarānī narrated it in al-Kabīr through Musaddad, ʿĀrim, and al-Muqaddamī, all of them reporting from Muʿtamir, and in their version it reads: “He performed ablution, then prayed, and then said: ….” This clearly refutes Ibn al-Sunnī’s chapter heading, “What one says while engaged in his ablution,” for the text states explicitly that the supplication was uttered after the prayer, not between the ablution and the prayer.

Second observation: the author cites the hadith to al-Nasāʾī without qualification, which misleads the reader into assuming that it is found in his Sunan—this is what scholars normally understand when an attribution to al-Nasāʾī is left unrestricted. In reality, however, the hadith is not in the Sunan but in al-Nasāʾī’s ʿAmal al-Yawm wa-l-Laylah, as al-Nawawī states explicitly in al-Adhkār, p. 38. The author ought to have specified this, especially since he has borrowed most of the material in this section from al-Nawawī, even if he does not acknowledge it!

I later found the narration in al-Nasāʾī’s ʿAmal al-Yawm wa-l-Laylah, 172/80, where he gives it exactly the same heading that Ibn al-Sunnī uses in his own work, 7.

This sort of ambiguity occurs often in the author’s book; I have pointed it out only rarely, when there was some benefit in doing so.

Third observation: the author, following al-Nawawī, declares the chain sound, but it is in fact weak because of a discontinuity between Abū Mijlaz and Abū Mūsā, as will be shown below. Al-Nawawī and those who followed him overlooked this, relying on the outward appearance of the chain, whose narrators are all reliable.

Al-Ḥāfiẓ Ibn Ḥajar says in al-Amālī:
“Regarding the Shaykh’s—meaning Imām al-Nawawī’s—judgment that the chain is sound, this requires review, for Abū Mijlaz did not meet Samura ibn Jundub or ʿImrān ibn Ḥuṣayn, as Ibn al-Madīnī states, and both of them lived after Abū Mūsā. Thus Abū Mijlaz’s having heard from Abū Mūsā is doubtful, and instances of his transmitting mursal reports are well known.”