92 – Ibn ʿAbbās (may Allah be pleased with him) reported that the Prophet ﷺ questioned the inhabitants of Qubāʾ and said, “Allah commends you.” They replied, “We follow the stones with water.” Al-Bazzār transmitted the report with a weak chain (1); its basic wording appears in Abū Dāwūd, and Ibn Khuzaymah declared it sound in the narration of Abū Hurayrah (may Allah be pleased with him) in which no mention of stones occurs (2).

Status of the ḥadīth:
The narration is authentic when the reference to stones is omitted, but weak when it includes them.

Ibn Ḥajar writes in al-Talkhīṣ: “The ḥadīth of Qubāʾ—‘…and they used to combine water and stones’—was related by al-Bazzār in his Musnad. We know of no one who reported it from al-Zuhrī except Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz, and Abū Ḥātim judged Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz weak.” For that reason al-Nawawī remarked in Sharḥ al-Muhadhdhab: “The accepted routes of the report state that they performed ritual cleansing (istinjāʾ) with water.” He also said in al-Khulāṣah: “As for what has become widespread in the exegetical and legal works—that they combined stones with water—this is unknown; what is reliably preserved is that they confined themselves to water.”

Abū Ḥātim, al-Nawawī, Ibn al-Qayyim, and Ibn Ḥajar all considered the wording that joins water and stones to be weak, and al-Muḥibb al-Ṭabarī declared, “It has no basis,” meaning the claim that they used both. Concerning restriction to water, Shaykh al-Albānī said, “The correct position is that the verse was revealed regarding the use of water only,” as in the ḥadīth traced back to the Prophet and transmitted by Abū Dāwūd from Abū Hurayrah.

Ibn Khuzaymah authenticated the version that mentions only water, and it was also recorded by Abū Dāwūd, al-Tirmidhī, and Ibn Mājah. In light of its supporting narrations, the ḥadīth is therefore deemed sound.