the Messenger of Allah ﷺ—should I not know that he has gone on to what is far better for him than this worldly life? Yet I weep…
It is astonishing that this error appears in every single manuscript and printed edition, including the copy annotated by Ibn ʿAllān (2/223). The edition that was recently published in Damascus by Dār al-Maʾmūn did correct the meaning, but only by conjecture, without returning to the primary source—Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim—and without noting that all the earlier copies shared the same mistake. Infallibility belongs to Allah alone.
- The ḥadith of Abū Saʿīd: “Paradise and Hell-fire argued…,” ḥadith 259 and 620, which the author attributes to Muslim.
I say: Muslim does not quote the ḥadith in full; he mentions only its opening and its closing sentences, and for the remainder he refers the reader to the preceding ḥadith of Abū Hurayrah, which differs in wording from what we have here. Imām Aḥmad, however, records the entire text verbatim (3/79), exactly as the compiler cites it, so it seems the compiler took it from Aḥmad yet attributed it to Muslim! Moreover, al-Bukhārī includes the report in his “Tafsīr” section from Abū Hurayrah in a version that is more complete than the narration of Abū Saʿīd; had the author chosen that wording, it would have been preferable.
- The compiler assigns a number of aḥādīth to al-Bukhārī even though they appear there only in muʿallaq form, such as aḥādīth 374, 608, and 1032. By doing so, he creates the impression that al-Bukhārī transmitted them with continuous chains, which is not the case. He should have qualified the citation by saying, “reported by al-Bukhārī as a muʿallaq,” for it is unanimously agreed among the scholars that this category within al-Bukhārī’s collection is open to criticism—some of it is even weak. To distinguish it from the connected reports, they have likewise agreed on the necessity of adding such a qualifier, as I explained at the beginning of my response to Shaykh Muḥammad al-Muntaṣir.