lapses that slipped into the Commentary; otherwise he is simply playing both ends against the middle.

9 – I charged him with a malicious act of misrepresentation concerning the aforementioned addendum, asserting that he was reversing the facts.

10 – I listed for him fourteen authentic ḥadīths found in the two Ṣaḥīḥs—or in one of them—every one of which his teacher al-Kawtharī had declared weak. I then asked for his verdict on that teacher: does he still regard him, as he once did, as “the erudite, verifying, authoritative imām…,” or does he now deem him unreliable for having weakened these sound reports?!

11 – Indeed, I even produced a ṣaḥīḥ ḥadīth narrated by Muslim whose text this very partisan had himself judged weak, clarifying for him the difference between his weakening of that report and my own critique of the chain of the ḥadīth mentioned earlier in paragraph (4).

12 – I likewise demonstrated the distinction between my limiting criticism to that particular chain—without faulting the text—and what appears in the introduction to Iʿlāʾ al-Sunan by al-Thanawī, where the Ṣaḥīḥayn are disparaged and various insinuations cast upon them, and how this biased zealot approved it in his commentary! The unavoidable conclusion is that they are the real detractors of the Ṣaḥīḥayn, no one else.

13 – I reproached the author of that introduction and its annotator for devising hadith principles that contravene the great scholars of the discipline. Among them is their claim that whenever a mujtahid cites a ḥadīth as evidence, that very citation constitutes authentication; another is their acceptance of a non-Companion’s mursal report from the second, third, and even fourth centuries—so that if a narrator, even in the fourth century or after the Six Imams, were simply to say, “The Messenger of Allah ﷺ said…,” the report would automatically be considered sound! I pointed out to him the peril of such supposed principles, which contradict what is agreed upon—even among many Hanafis—that the isnād is part of the religion,