He used to pressure certain elders in Kūfah into fabricating reports: he would read out to them complete collections and instruct them to transmit them. We have verified this from him with more than one shaykh in Kūfah (1).
Al-Ḥāfiẓ Abū Bishr al-Dūlābī (2) said in his book “al-Dhurrīyah al-Ṭāhirah”: “Isḥāq ibn Yūnus narrated to us; Suwayd ibn Saʿīd narrated to us; al-Muṭṭalib ibn Ziyād narrated to us, from Ibrāhīm ibn Ḥayyān, from ʿAbd Allāh ibn Ḥasan, from Fāṭimah bint al-Ḥusayn, from al-Ḥusayn, who said: ‘The head of the Messenger of Allah—peace and blessings be upon him—was in ʿAlī’s lap while revelation was coming down to him,’ and he related the ḥadīth in wording similar to what has already been cited.”
This Ibrāhīm ibn Ḥayyān was declared unreliable by al-Dāraquṭnī (3) and by others (4).
Al-Ḥāfiẓ Muḥammad ibn Nāṣir al-Baghdādī said, “This ḥadīth is fabricated,” and our teacher, al-Ḥāfiẓ Abū ʿAbd Allāh al-Dhahabī, remarked, “Ibn Nāṣir spoke the truth.”
Ibn al-Jawzī (5) added: “Ibn Mardawayh likewise reported it through the chain of Dāwūd ibn Farahīj (6), from Abū Hurayrah, who said: ‘The Messenger of Allah—peace and blessings be upon him—was sleeping with his head in ʿAlī’s lap and had not performed the ʿAṣr prayer until the sun had set. When the Messenger of Allah awoke, he supplicated for him, whereupon the sun was brought back until he prayed, after which it set a second time.’”
He continued: “Shuʿbah declared Dāwūd weak.”
Ibn al-Jawzī then said: “The stupidity of the forger of this ḥadīth is plain: he considered only the outward appearance of merit and failed to notice its lack of benefit. Once the sun has set, the ʿAṣr prayer has to be made up (qaḍāʾ); the sun’s return does not render it performed on time. In the authentic collections (7) the Messenger of Allah—peace and blessings be upon him—said: ‘The sun was never held back for anyone except Joshua.’”
I say: This ḥadīth (8) is weak and objectionable through every chain; not one of them is free from either a Shīʿī of unknown status or a Shīʿī who has been abandoned. A report of this nature cannot be accepted on the basis of a single narrator, even were its chain uninterrupted, because it belongs to the category of