—when in truth there was no mistake at all. His underlying aim in registering that point was to strip learned and virtuous readers of their confidence in al-Albani’s hadith grading, so that he could then seize upon it as a pretext to turn people away from the very book itself, the Commentary on the Creed.

I therefore answered him over several pages, the substance of which was this: an error committed by a trustworthy scholar in one or even several hadiths does not oblige us to discount his reliability altogether. I reinforced the argument with passages that the same biased zealot had himself quoted in some of his own footnotes. I then obliged him, by his own logic, to discard his confidence in the commentator on al-Tahawiyyah, for that commentator has not a few genuine mistakes—errors I set out in my hadith documentation and later summarized in the Introduction. Consequently I bound him to one of two conclusions: either (1) al-Albani’s misstep in a hadith or two does not nullify trust in him, or (2) if such a slip does nullify trust, then the commentator’s numerous mistakes make him even more deserving, in Abu Ghuddah’s eyes, of having his credibility revoked.

He kept silent on this as well, so what I bound him to remains binding, plain for all to see—especially since I begged him to show me any error he thought I had made, and he did not. After this, who can still claim that he “is not playing both sides of the rope”?

5. He also took a swipe at me for my statement regarding a hadith recorded by al-Bukhari: “Its chain is weak, yet it has other routes that may strengthen it….” I refuted him from two directions. First, I had been preceded in judging the chain weak by eminent authorities such as al-Dhahabi, Ibn Rajab al-Hanbali, and Ibn Hajar al-‘Asqalani; moreover, I spoke with caution about the text itself, merely hoping that its numerous routes would reinforce it. Later I became certain of that, as I clarified in al-Sahihah, no. 1640.

Second, I compelled him to admit that his censure ought to be directed first and foremost at his own teacher al-Kawthari, for it was al-Kawthari who transmitted the criticism of that Bukhari hadith