made by al-Ḥākim: “No one in its chain is disparaged except ʿAmr,” at al-Dhahabī’s silence over it, while al-Bayhaqī observed, “Its isnād is open to scrutiny.”

Note. In his commentary on al-Tirmidhī, the esteemed scholar Shaykh Aḥmad Muḥammad Shākir wrote that this Yaḥyā ibn Muslim is in fact Yaḥyā al-Bakkāʾ (with a fatḥah on the bāʾ and a doubled kāf), who is also weak, and he cited the verdicts of the critics to that effect. This, however, is a slip, for the Yaḥyā in our chain is not al-Bakkāʾ but another narrator of a later generation, and he is unknown, as al-Dhahabī and others have already stated, whereas al-Bakkāʾ is well known for his weakness, not for being unknown. Were matters as the learned Shaykh suggested, al-Tirmidhī’s remark, “Its chain is obscure,” would be pointless, since every transmitter would then be documented. By that statement he clearly meant that one of them is unknown, and the only candidate is Yaḥyā ibn Muslim al-Baṣrī himself.

In al-Taqrīb Ibn Ḥajar writes: “Yaḥyā ibn Muslim al-Baṣrī — unknown, sixth generation.” He then adds: “Yaḥyā ibn Muslim, or ibn Sulaym in the diminutive, better known as Yaḥyā al-Bakkāʾ — weak, fourth generation.”

As for the hadith, Ibn Ḥajar states in Fatḥ al-Bārī: “Its isnād is weak. It has supporting narrations — one from Abū Hurayrah and another from Salmān, both recorded by Abū Shaykh, and one from Ubayy ibn Kaʿb recorded by ʿAbd Allāh ibn Aḥmad in the Ziyādāt to the Musnad — yet all of them are feeble.”