He also censures those who rejected this wording—as did al-Nawawī. The sound view, however, is to keep the phrase indefinite, for that is how it appears in Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī and it accords with the Qur’anic wording: “It may be that your Lord will raise you to a praised station” (17:79). Further proofs are set out, with great skill, by Ibn al-Qayyim in Badāʾiʿ al-Fawāʾid; whoever wishes may consult them.

Notice: Many tongues have become accustomed to adding the words “al-darajah al-rafīʿah” (the lofty rank) to this supplication. This addition has no basis in any reliable source. Al-Ḥāfiẓ al-Sakhāwī says in al-Maqāṣid al-Ḥasanah, “I have not found it in any of the narrations,” and his teacher al-Ḥāfiẓ Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī states in al-Talkhīṣ, “None of its transmission routes contains the phrase ‘the lofty rank.’”

True, Ibn al-Sunnī does mention this addition, yet I am convinced it is an interpolation introduced by a copyist. Had it genuinely existed in the sound manuscripts of Ibn al-Sunnī, it would not have escaped the notice of scholars such as Ibn Ḥajar and al-Sakhāwī. This conclusion is strengthened by the fact that Ibn al-Sunnī transmits the report through al-Nasāʾī’s chain, and, as noted earlier, that wording is absent from al-Nasāʾī’s Sunan—proving it to be an insertion.

The same phrase has also slipped into the writings of certain exacting ḥadīth specialists: it appears in Shaykh al-Islām Ibn Taymiyyah’s al-Tawassul wa-l-Wasīlah and in Ibn al-Qayyim’s Ḥādī al-Arwāḥ, the former attributing it to al-Bukhārī and the latter to “the two Ṣaḥīḥs.” This is a compounded mistake, for Muslim never recorded the ḥadīth at all.