…worth forty thousand prayers.’ He was asked, ‘And in the Mosque of Damascus?’ He answered, ‘Thirty thousand.’ I comment: this chain of transmission is weak and obscure. ‘Abu Ziyad al-Shu‘bani’ appears to be Khiyar b. Salamah, Abu Ziyad al-Shami, and his counterpart ‘Abu Umayyah al-Shu‘bani’ is Yuhmad (with the yāʾ vocalised, the hāʾ silent, and the mīm kasrah). Both men are rated maqbul (acceptable) in Ibn Hajar’s Taqrib. However, the narrator who transmits from them, Habib the muʾadhdhin, is unknown; Ibn ‘Asakir mentions him in his Tarikh but merely says, ‘He used to give the adhan in the Sunday-Market mosque.’ The man who narrates from Habib, Ahmad b. Anas, has no biographical entry that I could find. What also invalidates this report attributed to Sufyan is that Sufyan himself is one of the transmitters of the forthcoming hadith of Abu Hurayrah which states that a single prayer in the Prophet’s Mosque is equal to one thousand elsewhere; it is therefore unlikely that he would assert something contrary to what he knew to be authentic from the Prophet. A further reason for rejection is that the soundest wording about the merit of prayer in Bayt al-Maqdis makes it equal to one thousand prayers; this version is related by Ibn Majah (1/429–430) and Ahmad (6/463) with a good chain. Yet the present report claims forty thousand! It later became clear to me that the isnad is indeed unsound, for it contains a defect that undermines its reliability, although some predecessors had declared it sound; I have clarified the matter in my work Da‘if Abi Dawud, ‘Chapter on Lamps in the Mosques.’ Moreover, an authentic report states that prayer in Bayt al-Maqdis is worth one quarter of a prayer in the Prophet’s Mosque, transmitted by al-Bayhaqi—making al-Thawri’s report invalid a fortiori, as is obvious. (1) Reported by al-Bukhari, Muslim and others from Abu Hurayrah; Muslim…