Moreover, for the purposes of mutābaʿa (corroboration) and istishhād (supporting testimony), one may even cite a narration transmitted by someone whose reports are not ordinarily relied upon—in fact, by any weak transmitter; and Allah knows best.

Type Sixteen: Recognizing the Additional Material Supplied by Reliable Narrators and the Ruling Concerning It

This is a subtle branch of the discipline that deserves careful attention. The majority of jurists and ḥadīth specialists accept such additions without restriction. A second view holds that they are never acceptable. A third position states that they are accepted if the additional wording is supplied by a narrator other than the one who once reported the ḥadīth in abridged form, but they are rejected when the very narrator who previously gave a shorter version now offers an expanded one. The Shaykh has divided these additions into several categories:

1. An addition that contradicts the reliable transmitters, as mentioned earlier; this is rejected.

2. An addition that does not conflict with them—for example, when a trustworthy narrator alone transmits an entire ḥadīth. Such an addition is accepted; al-Khaṭīb declared this to be the consensus of the scholars.

3. An extra word or phrase inserted into a ḥadīth while the rest of its transmitters omit it, such as in the report: Juʿilat lī al-arḍu masjidan wa ṭahūran ("The earth has been made for me a place of prostration and a means of purification"), where Abū Mālik al-Ashjaʿī alone added: wa turbatuhā ṭahūran ("and its soil is a purifying agent"). The Shaykh said that this resembles both the first and the second categories, yet the correct view is to accept this latter addition. He likewise cited the extra wording reported by Mālik in the ḥadīth of al-fiṭrah: min al-muslimīn ("among the Muslims").