81 – Jabir (may Allah be pleased with him) reported that the Messenger of Allah ﷺ said: “When two men go to relieve themselves, each one must screen himself from the other and they should not converse, for Allah loathes that.” Narrated by Ahmad; Ibn al-Sakan and Ibn al-Qattan deemed it authentic, yet it is defective. (1)

Grading of the ḥadith:
The ḥadith is defective. The flaw indicated by the author is what Abu Dawud mentioned: no one transmitted it with an unbroken chain except ʿIkrimah ibn ʿAmmar al-ʿAjlī al-Yamanī, and the leading scholars considered ʿIkrimah ibn ʿAmmar’s reports from Yahya ibn Abi Kathir weak, describing them as inconsistent.

Vocabulary of the ḥadith:
– idhā: a conditional particle that denotes a situation whose occurrence is certain, unlike the conditional particle in (if), whose result may or may not come to pass.
– taghawwaṭa: to relieve oneself; derived from ghāʾiṭ, originally a low-lying spot of ground. Because the Arabs used to meet this need in such depressions, the term was transferred—by metonymy—to human excrement, out of dislike for naming it directly; the usage later expanded into the verb form: “so-and-so taghawwaṭa (relieved himself).”
– rajulān: the dual of rajul (man), the male of humankind; its common plural is rijāl. Al-Miṣbāḥ notes a rare plural rajlah, on the pattern of tamrah, which is hardly used.