he fancies and discards the rest! And this is the very wording of al-Amīr in that passage:
“Al-Shāfiʿī records: ‘and he supported himself on the ground with his two hands.’ Yet I have not found this addition—‘with his two hands’—in the copy of al-Shāfiʿī nor in any other source, even though that is the first meaning that comes to mind when the term ‘support’ is used.”
Reflect, then, on how he has taken part of al-Amīr’s statement and left out the rest—the part endorsed by all the scholars, those who agree with him and those who disagree, as noted earlier. He omitted it only because it demolishes his second possibility, which he propped up by citing the hadith of Wāʾil—a report he himself admitted on p. 24 to be weak and broken in its chain, and which is transmitted solely through his second route, not through the other five routes he lists, along with the remaining ten wordings he possesses. He also appealed to the hadith of ʿAlī, which he likewise conceded on p. 29 to be weak, yet he still made it a corroborating proof for the hadith of Wāʾil. It is unfit for corroboration because of its extreme weakness: it contains Ziyād al-Sawāʾī, an unknown narrator from whom only ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Isḥāq al-Kūfī transmits, and the latter is weak by unanimous agreement, as al-Nawawī stated. For that reason al-Bayhaqī said of him, “abandoned,” i.e. exceedingly weak—and this abandoned narrator is the very one upon whom that supposed corroborative report rests.
Furthermore, the report concerns only rising after the first two rakʿahs—that is, after the Tashahhud—whereas the hadith of Wāʾil speaks of getting up from prostration! Despite its weakness, he later returns on p. 99 and says of it, “a hadith that is sound and explicit, whereas the hadith of Mālik is sound yet unsound.” No scholar has ever advanced such a claim, and it is self-contradictory in both halves, as has already been shown and will be shown again.
3 – While he musters weak reports, as you have seen, to bolster—so he alleges—the second possibility for interpreting “supporting oneself on the ground” in the hadith of Mālik ibn al-Ḥuwayrith, he ignores whatever actually strengthens the first possibility. Thus he writes on p. 17: “The first possibility is reinforced by the hadith of Ibn ʿUmar concerning kneading (al-ʿajn)—were it authentic—”