As for the section on fasting, he writes under the subtitle “Its Virtue”:

3 – On the authority of ʿAbd Allah ibn ʿAmr, the Prophet ﷺ said, “Fasting and the Quran will intercede for the servant on the Day of Resurrection….” Aḥmad narrated it with a sound chain.

I say: On the contrary, Aḥmad’s isnād is weak because it contains Ibn Lahīʿah, whose memory was defective. The mistake arose from the author’s overly drastic abridgement of al-Munḏhirī’s documentation of the ḥadith. In al-Targhīb he states,

“It was narrated by Aḥmad and by al-Ṭabarānī in al-Kabīr, and its narrators are relied upon in the Ṣaḥīḥ.”

The author assumed that the pronoun in “its narrators” referred to the ḥadith and, on that basis, felt free to cite only Aḥmad when he omitted al-Ṭabarānī. That is not the case. The pronoun actually refers to al-Ṭabarānī, who is the closest mentioned, and al-Haythamī made this explicit, saying,

“It was narrated by Aḥmad and by al-Ṭabarānī in al-Kabīr, and the narrators of al-Ṭabarānī are the narrators of the Ṣaḥīḥ.”

The author then inferred from al-Munḏhirī’s remark “and its narrators are relied upon in the Ṣaḥīḥ” that the chain is sound, and he stated this outright. Such a conclusion, however, is not warranted, as we clarified in the introduction.

Admittedly, the ḥadith is not exclusive to Ibn Lahīʿah, as al-Haythamī’s words plainly indicate, and that is indeed the case. ʿAbd Allah ibn Wahb corroborated him in a narration recorded by Ibn Naṣr in Qiyām al-Layl, p. 13, and by al-Ḥākim 1/554, who declared, “Authentic according to the criteria of Muslim,” an assessment al-Dhahabī endorsed. Both scholars, however, erred, for Ibn Wahb’s shaykh in this report—as well as that of Ibn Lahīʿah—is Ḥayyī ibn ʿAbd Allah, from whom Muslim transmitted nothing. Even so, certain critics spoke about him in terms that do not lower his ḥadith below the level of ḥasan, Allah willing.