“It has no established chain of transmission.”

However, the report is also narrated from Jābir and ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib, and with those two chains it is ḥasan, as I have shown in al-Ṣaḥīḥa 831.

Under Etiquette, item 2, he writes: “Then he supplicates—meaning when he awakens—with the words reported from the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, saying: ‘There is no deity except You; exalted are You … grant me mercy from Yourself, for You are the Bestower.’”

I say: it suffers from the same defect as the two narrations before it. Apparently the author was misled by al-Nawawī’s statement in al-Adhkār: “We have transmitted it in Sunan Abū Dāwūd with a chain that he did not declare weak, from ʿĀʾishah.” I have already clarified in the introduction that Abū Dāwūd’s silence over a report is not grounds for relying on it—see there. This ḥadīth illustrates the point, for its isnād contains ʿAbdullāh ibn al-Walīd, whom al-Ḥāfiẓ describes in al-Taqrīb as “soft” in ḥadīth, relying chiefly on al-Dāraqutnī, who said: “His ḥadīth is not to be considered,” and graded him weak. Ibn Ḥibbān, by contrast, declared him reliable, so al-Ḥāfiẓ took a middle course and judged him mildly weak. It is therefore surprising that he deemed the report sound in al-Natāʾij, Q 24/1!

As for his phrase: “Then he says: O Allah, to You belongs all praise; You are the Light of the heavens and the earth …,” this is one of the opening invocations for the night prayer, as is stated explicitly in the versions of Abū ʿAwānah in his Ṣaḥīḥ and Abū Dāwūd, both traced back to Ibn ʿAbbās. The wording appears in unrestricted form in the two Ṣaḥīḥs, so the compiler cited it here, yet he also adopted the restricted wording recorded by Abū Dāwūd in al-Tawajjuh 1/270—and that is correct, for the specific overrides the general, as is well established.