Among the discussions on combining the two prayers he writes under the heading “Combining because of rain”: “Al-Bukhari reported that the Prophet ﷺ combined Maghrib and ʿIshaʾ on a rainy night.”

I say: To attribute this report to al-Bukhari is an unmistakable error; in fact, I doubt that it has any basis at all in any of the hadith collections in circulation today. I do not recall ever coming across a narration with this purport, and I have just reviewed the places where it would normally be found and did not locate it. Had it existed, the hadith specialists would certainly have cited it in the chapter “Combining the prayers for a resident in a town,” rather than resorting to less explicit evidence such as the forthcoming hadith of Ibn ʿAbbas on combining out of need. It is practically inconceivable that a report like this, were it genuine, could have eluded them. How, then, did this mistake creep into the author’s work? Most probably he copied it from certain fiqh manuals that have no knowledge