Third: That conclusion is built upon the wording cited by the annotator—“kohl and the ring.” This is a mistake for two reasons:

First: The wording is weak and unauthentic. The annotator himself admitted as much elsewhere (3/431). The wording that is reliably established from Ibn ʿAbbas and others is only: “the face and the two hands,” as mentioned a short while ago; the evidence, therefore, is perfectly clear.

Second: The Companion paired with Ibn ʿAbbas in al-Sarakhsi’s phrase is either Ibn ʿUmar or ʿAʾishah—as I favored above—and their wording is identical to the sound report from Ibn ʿAbbas, as you have seen. Consequently, it is impermissible to interpret their wording—or that of either of them—in line with the weak variant attributed to Ibn ʿAbbas. This is obvious and cannot be missed by scholars.

Accordingly, the supposed inference collapses at its root, and it becomes evident that the annotation in question carries no scholarly weight, for it rests on muddled thinking rather than on careful investigation and the discrimination of authentic reports from weak ones.

At this point a question naturally presents itself—as people say today: Why did our brother Muḥammad b. Ismāʿīl favor the weak wording over the sound one?

The answer may be given from several angles:

First: because it suits the statement of al-Bābirtī the Ḥanafī.

Second: because he does not discern the difference between the two wordings in terms of transmission, even though he does discern the difference between them in terms of analysis.

⦗131⦘