He says, “I maintain that the narration transmitted by his son Yūnus was not recorded during the period of confusion, God willing.” This—as is obvious—implies that he acknowledges the very fact of confusion, yet he quickly retreats from that admission and, only a few lines later, writes: “I have not come across any confusion on the part of Abū Isḥāq, even though Ibn al-Kayyāl mentioned it in his book al-Kawākib al-Nayyirāt (pp. 341–356).”

Such are the words of the poor man. So, dear reader—if you can—try to reconcile his claim of finding no evidence with his simultaneous acknowledgment that Ibn al-Kayyāl did list the narrator in the above-named work, whose full title is In Identifying the Reliable Narrators Who Became Confused. Add to that al-Ḥāfiẓ’s own testimony of the confusion, together with the statements of others such as Ibn al-Ṣalāḥ, Ibn Kathīr, and many more. They have all explained who narrated from him before the confusion—whose reports are accepted—and who narrated from him after it—whose reports are rejected. Among the latter is Yūnus ibn Abī Isḥāq, as Ibn Numayr has already noted, yet this is precisely what al-Sindī has just denied. He is guilty of many such contradictions—I have counted eight of them in hadith matters alone, far too numerous to detail here. Their full discussion appears in Silsilat al-Aḥādīth al-Ḍaʿīfa, no. 5959. One example is his assertion that Abū Isḥāq’s tadlīs (concealed transmission) was not harmful and his rebuttal of al-Ḥāfiẓ for placing him in the third tier, even though he was unaware of Ibn al-Qaṭṭān’s statement in al-Wahm wa-l-Īhām (2/208/2): “He practiced tadlīs frequently.” [61]