Fourth: the report is understood to mean that the reward is diminished for the one who offers the funeral prayer in the mosque and then returns without accompanying the bier to the cemetery, for he has forfeited the merit of escorting it to the graveyard and attending the burial. End of quotation.

I say: The version that carries greater weight for me, from the standpoint of transmission, is the wording fa laysa lahu shayʾ or fa lā shayʾa lahu (“he has nothing”), because that is how everyone who recorded the ḥadith—so far as I have found—narrated it, with the sole exception of Abū Dāwūd. He transmitted it through the route of Yaḥyā ibn Saʿīd from Ibn Abī Dhʿīb, who said, “Ṣāliḥ, the freedman of al-Tuʾamah, related to me,” with the wording fa lā shayʾa ʿalayhi (“there is nothing against him”). By contrast, Wakiʿ (as in Ibn Mājah and Aḥmad), Ḥajjāj, Yazīd ibn Hārūn (in both Aḥmad and Asad), and Maʿn ibn ʿĪsā (in al-Ṭaḥāwī) all narrated it from Ibn Abī Dhʿīb with the wording fa lā shayʾa lahu (“he has nothing”); only the first of them expressed it as fa laysa lahu shayʾ (“he has nothing”), which in meaning is identical.

None of the replies cited by al-Nawawī satisfies me except the first: that the ḥadith is weak and therefore provides no evidence. Yet the weakening he related is not, by itself, sufficiently convincing, for al-Nawawī himself says in Sharḥ al-Muhadhdhab: “It is weak by unanimous agreement of the ḥadith masters. Those who explicitly declared it weak include Imām Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal, Abū Bakr ibn al-Mundhir, al-Bayhaqī, and others. Aḥmad said, ‘This ḥadith is among those in which the narrator stood alone…’”