“When you hear the muʾadhdhin proclaiming the call, then say what he says….” The full report will be cited later; Muslim and others transmit it. Abū Dāwūd and several other compilers relate the same meaning in a slightly different wording, which will also be mentioned in due course.
- On the authority of Umm Ḥabībah:
The Messenger of Allah ﷺ, whenever he was staying with her on her allotted day and night and heard the muʾadhdhin, would repeat exactly what the muʾadhdhin was saying.
Ibn Mājah, al-Ṭaḥāwī, and Aḥmad record this tradition; the wording quoted here is Aḥmad’s, transmitted through Abū al-Malīḥ ibn Usāmah, who said: “ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿUtbah ibn Abī Sufyān informed me, ‘My aunt Umm Ḥabībah narrated it to me.’”
All the narrators in this chain belong to those used by the two Shaykhs except for ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿUtbah. Al-Dhahabī comments, “He is scarcely known; only Abū al-Malīḥ transmits from him.” Al-Taqrīb rates him as “acceptable.”
From this it is evident that the remark of the author of al-Zawāʾid—“Its isnād is ṣaḥīḥ”—is not correct. His further claim (1): “ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿUtbah is narrated by al-Nasāʾī, and Ibn Khuzaymah includes him in his Ṣaḥīḥ; therefore he considers him trustworthy, and the rest of the transmitters are reliable,” still fails to validate the authenticity of the ḥadīth. For a sound isnād must meet the well-known conditions laid down in hadith methodology, and some scholars may occasionally relax one of those conditions—such as demonstrable uprightness. However, the majority require that a narrator’s integrity be positively established before his report is deemed authentic. Ibn Khuzaymah and those of similar approach content themselves with the absence of any explicit criticism of the narrator, but that does not suffice in the judgement of the meticulous hadith specialists.