Eleventh Note

In the footnote to page 126, al-Albani takes Ibn al-Qayyim—may Allah have mercy on him—to task for stating, in agreement with his teacher Shaykh al-Islam Abu al-ʿAbbas Ibn Taymiyyah—may Allah have mercy on him—that no authentic hadith has come down containing the wording “Ibrahim and the family of Ibrahim together,” that is, in the formula: “just as You sent blessings upon Ibrahim and the family of Ibrahim, and just as You bestowed favor upon Ibrahim and the family of Ibrahim.” Al-Albani then exulted in producing a narration with that wording, saying, “This is in reality one of the benefits of this book,” meaning thereby his own work, and so on until the end of his remarks.

I say: this benefit actually belongs to the book al-Ikhtiyarat by Shaykh ʿAlaʾ al-Din, known as Ibn al-Lahham, and to Fath al-Bari by the hadith master Ibn Hajar al-ʿAsqalani. Ibn al-Lahham, in the chapter on the Description of Prayer, reports that Shaykh al-Islam Abu al-ʿAbbas—may Allah have mercy on him—said: “Among the hadiths recorded in the canonical collections I have not found any that include the wording, ‘just as You sent blessings upon Ibrahim and upon the family of Ibrahim.’ What is common in most of the narrations and their chains is the wording ‘the family of Ibrahim,’ and in some of them only the wording ‘Ibrahim.’ Al-Bayhaqi transmitted the combination of ‘Ibrahim’ and ‘the family of Ibrahim’ with a weak chain from Ibn Masʿud.” Ibn al-Lahham then adds: “I say: rather, al-Bukhari in his Sahih narrated the combination of the two.”

As for Ibn Hajar, he said in his commentary on the “Book of Supplications” in the Sahih