“ʿAbd al-Wahhab ibn ʿAtaʾ al-Khuffaf is reliable, though he may make mistakes,” and in the notice for his father ʿAtaʾ he wrote: “Reliable, but he errs a great deal.”

Yet I have not been able to determine whether the transmitter of the report from Ibn Abi Ghaniyyah is the father or the son, because the manuscripts differ, as mentioned earlier. The annotator of al-Muḥalla, Judge Ahmad Muhammad Shakir, decided in favor of the father and ruled the variant reading incorrect—probably on the grounds that Ibn Hazm criticised ʿAtaʾ but said nothing about ʿAbd al-Wahhab. On that basis one must ask: who, then, is this ʿAbd al-Wahhab? If it be said that he is the very son of ʿAtaʾ just referred to, we reply that we have found no source that counts him among those who narrated from his father. And if he is someone else, I do not know him. Allah knows best.

In any event, the axis of this ḥadith, like the ones before it, is Jassarah, and she is not widely renowned for trustworthiness and upright conduct such that the heart can rest assured in citing her report independently. None of the early authorities whose judgments carry weight declared her reliable; on the contrary, al-Bukhari censured her, as will be shown. For that reason a number of ḥadith critics deemed her report weak, a point to which al-Khattabi alluded in Maʿalim. Abu Muhammad ʿAbd al-Haqq said, “It is not established on account of its chain.”

Ibn al-Qattan attempted to refute this, but his rejoinder is neither adequate nor satisfying, for he said— as quoted in Nasb al-Rayah—: “Jassarah bint Dujajah is a Successor, and al-Bukhari’s statement in his al-Tarikh al-Kabir …”