His statement under no. 7 runs: “…the ḥadith of Qatadah from ʿAbd-Allah ibn Sarjis, who said, ‘The Messenger of Allah ﷺ forbade urinating into a burrow.’ They asked Qatadah, ‘Why is urinating into a burrow disliked?’ He replied, ‘Because such holes are the dwelling places of the jinn.’ It was transmitted by Ahmad and declared authentic by Ibn Khuzaymah and Ibn al-Sakan.”

I say: The report is weak, and those who graded it sound did so out of leniency or error, for it carries a defect that bars it from being judged authentic: Qatadah narrates it with ʿanʿana—that is, with an indeterminate “from.” Qatadah was a mudallis. Al-Hafiz Burhan al-Din al-Halabi listed him among the mudallisin in al-Tabyin li-Asmaʾ al-Mudallisin and wrote, “He is well known for tadlis.” The same observation is found in Ibn Hajar’s Tabaqat al-Mudallisin, where he adds, “Al-Nasaʾi and others described him as such.” Ibn Hajar places him in the third tier, which—as he explains in the introduction—consists of “those who practised tadlis frequently; the leading scholars accepted their ḥadith only when they explicitly stated hearing, while some scholars rejected them outright and others accepted them.”

All this holds even if Qatadah’s actual hearing from Ibn Sarjis were generally established. ʿAli ibn al-Madini affirmed that link, whereas others denied it. Al-Hakim states in Maʿrifat ʿUlūm al-Ḥadith, p. 111: “Let the student of ḥadith know that al-Hasan did not hear from Abu Hurayrah … and that Qatadah did not hear from any Companion except Anas.”

Accordingly, in his judgment the isnād is broken (munqaṭiʿ). Yet al-Hakim nevertheless included it in the Mustadrak and declared it sound, apparently overlooking the defect. For this reason Ibn al-Turkumani deemed the ḥadith weak, saying in al-Jawhar al-Naqi: “I say: Ibn Abi Hatim narrated from Harb ibn Ismaʿil, from Ibn Ḥanbal, that …”