ibn Yaḥyā al-Dhuhli said, “There is no report about ʿAbd Allāh ibn Zayd sounder than the narration of Muḥammad ibn Isḥāq from Muḥammad ibn Ibrāhīm al-Taymi”—that is, this very report—“for Muḥammad heard it from his father ʿAbd Allāh.”
Ibn Khuzaymah stated in his Ṣaḥīḥ, “This ḥadīth is rigorously authentic in its transmission, because Muḥammad heard it from his father ʿAbd Allāh.” He also said in the same work, “This ḥadīth is rigorously authentic in its transmission: Muḥammad heard it from his father, and Ibn Isḥāq heard it from al-Taymi, and it is not one of the reports in which he engaged in tadlīs.”
Ibn Isḥāq possesses another chain for this tradition which Aḥmad recorded (4/42–43) from him. He said: “Muḥammad ibn Muslim al-Zuhri related from Saʿīd ibn al-Musayyab, from ʿAbd Allāh ibn Zayd ibn ʿAbd Rabbih, who said: When the Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, resolved to strike a clapper to gather the people for prayer—though he disliked doing so because it resembled the Christians—an apparition came to me one night while I was asleep: a man wearing two green garments and carrying a clapper in his hand. I said to him, ‘Servant of Allah, would you sell the clapper…?’” He then narrated the rest in words similar to the earlier version and added at the end: “Bilāl, the freedman of Abū Bakr, used to call with those words and would summon the Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, to the prayer. One morning he came to invite him to the dawn prayer but was told, ‘The Messenger of Allah is asleep.’ So Bilāl cried out at the top of his voice, ‘Prayer is better than sleep!’” Saʿīd ibn al-Musayyab said, “That phrase was then inserted into the adhān for Fajr.”
This chain too is good, and although Ibn Isḥāq did not explicitly state that he heard it from al-Zuhri, several transmitters corroborated him. Al-Ḥākim said (3/336): “The ḥadīth of al-Zuhri from Saʿīd ibn al-Musayyab is well known; it was transmitted by Yūnus ibn Yazīd, Maʿmar ibn Rāshid, Shuʿayb ibn Abī Ḥamzah, Muḥammad ibn Isḥāq, and others.”