form.’ He then related a similar account.”

As for the hadith of Umm al-Tufayl, Ahmad’s rejection of it because he did not know some of its narrators does not rule out his having learned about them later. Moreover, his instruction that it be narrated to him was because its meaning agreed with the other hadiths, such as those of Mu‘ādh, Ibn ‘Abbās, and others.

This is what al-Khallāl meant in saying that this hadith is narrated, despite some flaw in its chain of transmission, only to corroborate other reports, and because the Jahmiyya deny expressions it contains which have been reliably transmitted elsewhere. It was therefore narrated to show that what they denied was supported by mutually corroborating and widely transmitted reports.

Likewise, Abū Bakr ‘Abd al-‘Azīz’s statement, “There is weakness in it, yet we affirm it,” means that this is because its agreement with other, reliably established reports has been demonstrated—not that a weak report is affirmed without evidence. For weakness in a hadith’s chain of transmission does not preclude its text and meaning from being true. Nor does it preclude the existence of supporting narrations and corroborating chains that demonstrate its authenticity.

What they mean by “weak” is that we do not know whether its narrator is upright, or we do not know whether he is accurate in transmission. Thus, our lack of knowledge of either