—a judgment that did not spring from sound knowledge of this noble science.
What I shall now mention in refuting his second alleged defect will make this even clearer.
His other objection concerns: al-Haytham ibn ʿImrān al-ʿAbsī.
Our friend devoted ten whole pages to this point, yet to no worthwhile effect, and—true to the pattern of his “pamphlet”—he repeatedly digressed into matters wholly unrelated to the supposed flaw.
In sum, he claims that because only five people narrated from al-Haytham, the man is, in his eyes, “of unknown status.” Almost everything he cited on the matter he actually lifted from some of my own works.
He then quoted al-Ḥāfiẓ’s remarks in Lisān al-Mīzān criticizing Ibn Ḥibbān’s practice of declaring a transmitter reliable even if only a single person narrated from him. After that, he reproduced similar statements of mine from various places in my books. All of that is accurate; yet, because his acquaintance with this discipline is still new, he failed to distinguish between that criticized approach and the course I followed in strengthening al-Haytham’s ḥadith on the grounds that five trustworthy narrators transmitted it from him.
To show—so he imagines—my inconsistency in this area, he presented the ḥadith of Muʿādh concerning judicial procedure, which I deemed anomalous for several reasons, among them the obscurity of al-Ḥārith ibn ʿAmr despite Ibn Ḥibbān’s endorsement of him. Thus he imagines that everyone authenticated by Ibn Ḥibbān is, by definition, unknown—whether in person or in status. This is the confusion and error that led him, on p. 56, to claim that I adopted Ibn Ḥibbān’s criticized method.
I shall now present proofs from the words of the scholars that demonstrate the soundness of my position and the error of his charge.
- Al-Dhahabī, in the biography of Mālik ibn al-Khayr al-Zabādī, wrote:
“He occupies the rank of truthfulness… Ḥaywah ibn Sharīḥ, Ibn Wahb, Zayd ibn al-Ḥabbāb, and Rushdīn narrated from him. Ibn al-Qaṭṭān said: ‘He is among those whose uprightness has not been formally established’—meaning that no one explicitly declared him trustworthy. Yet the majority hold that when a shaykh has a group of pupils who transmit from him and nothing objectionable is reported about him, his ḥadīth is acceptable.”