transmitting some of them at certain times (1), just as he might withhold certain hadiths on jurisprudence (2), legal rulings, predestination, the Divine Names and rulings, warnings, and the like at other times. He did not limit this practice to the present topic alone. Some scholars would do this, while others disagreed with them, because one of them might suppose that narrating a report would harm certain (3) people at that particular moment, whereas another would judge that it caused no harm but rather brought benefit. Thus it became one of the issues over which they occasionally differed.
As for forbidding the general transmission of all hadiths concerning the Divine Attributes to the entirety of the ummah, this (4) is a stance never taken by anyone who believes in Allah and the Last Day. Such an opinion is found only among those renegades who have broken away from the law of Islam, like the Rāfiḍah (5) and the Jahmiyyah.
(1) As transmitted from Abu Hurayrah (may Allah be pleased with him) and other Companions, who refrained from mentioning some of what they had heard out of regard for the circumstances surrounding the transmission of what they received from the Prophet (peace be upon him).
Al-Bukhari records in his Ṣaḥīḥ (vol. 1, p. 38; The Book of Knowledge, Chapter on Preserving Knowledge), from Abu Hurayrah (may Allah be pleased with him), who said: “I preserved two collections from the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him). As for one of them, I disseminated it; as for the other, had I disseminated it, my throat would have been cut.”
Ibn Hajar comments in his Fatḥ al-Bārī (vol. 1, p. 322): “This ḥadīth indicates that he did not transmit everything he had memorized. Yet what has come down from him still exceeds the surviving narrations of other prolific transmitters.”
Likewise, it is reported from others that they withheld some of what they heard until shortly before their death—out of remorse and embarrassment at the thought of dying and taking the scholarly truth with them. Muslim records in his Ṣaḥīḥ (vol. 4, p. 2105; The Book of Repentance, Chapter on the Expiation of Sins through Istighfār and Repentance, Ḥadīth 2748), from Abū Ayyūb al-Anṣārī (may Allah be pleased with him), who said on his deathbed: “I had concealed from you something I heard from the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him). I heard him say: ‘Were it not that you sin, Allah would create people who sin and then forgive them.’”
(2) In some manuscripts and editions: “fi al-fiqh” (in jurisprudence).
(3) In some manuscripts and editions: “ba‘ḍ” (some).
(4) In some manuscripts and editions: “fa-idhā mā dhahaba” (when it has departed).
(5) al-Rawāfiḍ (the Rawafida): so called for their rejection of the imamate of Abu Bakr and Umar. It is also said this name stems from their rejection of Zayd ibn Ali when he went forth to fight Hisham ibn ʿAbd al-Malik and they opposed him.