—namely, the unqualified wording he cites: “And in another of his narrations it is stated that this was during the night prayer.”

Al-Shawkani adopted the same view, saying in Nayl al-Awtar 2/161: “Muslim, however, restricted it to the night prayer and added the phrase: from the middle of the night.”

I say: This is altogether a mistake, for in Muslim 2/185–186 neither that restriction nor that extra wording is found. They appear only in the hadith of Ibn ʿAbbas which Muslim quoted immediately before this report, in the wording: “When he rose to pray in the middle of the night he would say, ‘O Allah, to You belongs all praise…,’” which Muslim classed as the seventh type in the book. Al-Shawkani’s eye must have wandered to that narration while he was writing, and thus he slipped.

As for al-Hafiz, his error was probably due to the fact that Muslim—may Allah have mercy on him—listed the hadith among a set of narrations on the night vigil (qiyam al-layl).

It seems this misunderstanding is old, for Shaykh al-Islam Ibn Taymiyyah already alluded to it at the end of his comments on this hadith in al-Kalim al-Tayyib, p. 58 (in my critical edition), where he said: “It is said that this was during the night prayer.”

There I added a brief note pointing to al-Tirmidhi’s version and others, and highlighting the mistake of al-Hafiz, al-Sanʿani, and al-Shawkani.

Al-Shawkani plunged even deeper into error in his other work, al-Sayl al-Jarrar 1/224, where, concerning Muslim’s report, he stated: “It is restricted in Sahih Muslim to the night prayer, and if others transmit it without qualification it should be interpreted…”