and al-Dhahabī concurred.

I then remarked: The very words of these distinguished imams that establish this great principle—the strengthening of a ḥadīth by means of multiple chains and supporting narrations—and their practical application of it in the cases just cited constitute the clearest proof of the ignorance of those who declare this ḥadīth weak. It is as though they are unaware of what the scholars term ḥadīth ḥasan or ṣaḥīḥ li-ghayrih. Their situation, as one observer put it, is like that of a judge before whom a case requiring the testimony of one man and two women is brought: a single woman testifies, so he rejects her statement because her testimony counts as half that of a man. Then a second woman appears and gives identical testimony, yet he rejects her as well on the very same pretext. Such are these people. Allah is the One whose help is sought.

This is the bane of most writers today. They have treated this science lightly and rush to declare narrations sound or weak without first learning its principles and foundations. I saw one of them address the Prophet’s saying, “No zakāt is due on wealth until it has been in one’s possession for a full year,” and he graded it weak through all four of its channels, even though he knows that Ibn Ḥajar and others deemed it strong, and he knows that the Rightly Guided Caliphs acted upon it. He took no notice of any of that, and on top of it all he overlooked an authentic chain that he never even cited—one I had pointed out while documenting the ḥadīth in Irwāʾ (3/254/767), and which appears in Ṣaḥīḥ Abī Dāwūd (1403). He should either have investigated it or deferred to the findings and expertise of the scholars.
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