The first ḥadīth—“Whoever lets his garment trail …,” and so forth—comes through Nāfiʿ from Ibn ʿUmar. The second ḥadīth, however, is explicitly transmitted by Nāfiʿ from Sulaymān ibn Yasār from her. Ayyūb’s version is summary in form and lacks this detail, and the corroboration supplied by al-ʿAmrī does not carry sufficient weight, for he—ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿUmar al-Mukabbir—is weak in memory, especially since his trustworthy and firmly grounded younger brother, ʿUbayd Allāh al-Aṣghar, contradicts him.

Subsequently I discovered evidence indicating that Ayyūb’s report is also found in a detailed form. Imām Aḥmad said: “Ismāʿīl narrated to us; Ayyūb related to us, from Nāfiʿ, from Ibn ʿUmar, who said: The Messenger of Allah ﷺ said, ‘Indeed, whoever lets his garment drag…’—and so on. Nāfiʿ added, ‘I was informed that Umm Salamah said…’—and again, ‘I was informed that Umm Salamah said…,’ and the report continues.”

This Ismāʿīl—namely Ibn Ibrāhīm Ibn ʿUlayyah, a reliable ḥāfiẓ—thus shows that Ayyūb’s transmission matches that of ʿUbayd Allāh in detail, except that he names the intermediary whom Ayyūb had left unnamed, an addition that is unquestionably admissible.

From this it appears that all these lines of transmission are sound. At times Nāfiʿ narrates the ḥadīth with a broken chain and at times with a connected one, and in this matter he had two teachers: Sulaymān ibn Yasār—a trustworthy and eminent scholar, one of the celebrated Seven Jurists of Medina whose narrations were relied upon by both al-Bukhārī and Muslim—and Ṣafiyyah bint Abī ʿUbayd, a reliable transmitter found in Muslim’s collection and the wife of Ibn ʿUmar, may Allah be pleased with them.

There is yet another route for the ḥadīth from Ibn ʿUmar, which Abū Dāwūd, Ibn Mājah, and Aḥmad recorded through Zayd al-ʿAmmī, from Abū aṣ-Ṣiddīq an-Nājī, from Ibn ʿUmar, who said: “The Messenger of Allah ﷺ granted the Mothers of the Believers a concession with respect to the hem, allowing a handspan; they then requested more, so he extended it for them.”