that al-Zuhrī said about it, “It has reached me that ʿĀʾishah and Ḥafṣah—,” and they counted Sufyān mistaken for joining the chain (1). Ṣāliḥ b. Abī al-Akhdar and Jaʿfar b. Burqān followed him in that, yet their corroboration gave the report no real strength. Al-Tirmidhī stated, “I asked Muḥammad b. Ismāʿīl about this ḥadīth, and he replied, ‘It is not authentic.’” The same ruling was issued by Muḥammad b. Yaḥyā al-Dhuḥlī.

Section

As for your assertion that “the ḥadīth is sound because its transmitters are trustworthy,” and so forth, the answer is two-fold:

First: as has been pointed out repeatedly, a narrator’s reliability is only one of the conditions of authenticity and but a part of what confers it; therefore, mere reliability does not of itself oblige us to judge the ḥadīth authentic.

To clarify: a reliable narrator is one who is truthful—who does not deliberately lie and does not deem it permissible to employ tadlīs while knowing it to be false. This is indeed one of the qualities required for accepting a report, yet another quality remains: precision and carefulness, so that he is not known for heedlessness or frequent mistakes.

The second quality (2) is that he must not be at odds with the community by narrating something contradicted by transmitters who are more reliable and senior than he, or by relating a report for which he finds no corroboration, and it is not