from the west,’ and it will rise from the west.” The Messenger of Allah—may Allah bless him and grant him peace—then said: “Do you know when that will be? It will be when no soul will benefit from its faith if it had not believed before or earned any good through its faith” (1).

• A critique of Rashīd Rida’s rejection of Abū Dharr’s hadith concerning the sun’s prostration:

Rashīd Rida cited the preceding hadith of Abū Dharr and commented that its text was among the most problematic of all hadith texts. Regarding its chain of transmission, he said: “Al-Bukhārī and Muslim narrated this hadith through several chains from Ibrāhīm ibn Yazīd ibn Sharīk al-Taymī, from Abū Dharr. Although the hadith scholars generally deemed Ibrāhīm trustworthy, he was known to use ambiguous transmission formulas that could conceal an intermediary. Imam Ahmad said, ‘He never met Abū Dharr.’ Al-Dāraqutnī likewise said, ‘He did not hear from Hafsa or Aisha, nor did he live in their time.’ Ibn al-Madīnī similarly said, ‘He did not hear from Ali or Ibn Abbas.’ This is recorded in Tahdhīb al-Tahdhīb.

“He also related other reports from these individuals using only the ambiguous formula ‘from’; it is therefore possible that the person who transmitted them to him was not trustworthy.

“If some reports in the two Sahīh collections and the Sunan works contain defects such as these—in addition to the possibility that Israelite lore entered them and that errors arose through transmission by meaning rather than verbatim—then what can be said of the reports that al-Bukhārī and Muslim did not include, and that the compilers of the Sunan works omitted?!” (2).