from Saʿid b. ʿAbd al-ʿAziz, from al-Zuhri, with that very wording. Someone asked, “Who is Saʿid b. ʿAbd al-ʿAziz?” ⦗1⦘ He replied, “al-Tanukhi.” He then said, “This is a mistake; it is actually Saʿid b. Bashir.”

These are his exact words. As you can see, they give no indication that, in his view, the hadith is authentic or well preserved. When he said, “It is narrated by Sufyan b. Husayn from al-Zuhri, and that is the preserved version,” he only meant that substituting Qatadah for al-Zuhri is an error on the part of whoever named him, and that the correct chain is al-Zuhri from Saʿid, not Qatadah from Saʿid—for Qatadah has no share in this report at all. What the scholars have retained is al-Zuhri from Saʿid. That is the sense of his statement, so where is the testimony that the hadith is sound and firmly established?

Section

They further said: “As for your claim that Abu Ahmad b. ʿAdiyy testified that the report has a basis and endorsed Saʿid’s narration of it from Abu Hurayrah…”—the same misunderstanding befell you here as in the case of al-Darqutni’s words. Had you quoted Ibn ʿAdiyy verbatim, it would have been clear to you ⦗2⦘ that he did not consider the hadith sound or even fair; for he cited it in his book al-Kamil, where he most often records the hadiths that have been criticized in connection with the narrator whose biography he is giving. We shall therefore reproduce his words