This is like saying, “I do not know that they regarded him as acceptable.” This implies that, in their estimation, he does not belong to the highest tier. For this reason, al-Bukhārī and Muslim did not include reports from him or others like him. Yet their merely not including a narrator’s reports does not warrant rejecting his hadiths.

Accordingly, when both the critic and the scholar declaring a narrator reliable are leading authorities, criticism is accepted only when its grounds are explained. A declaration of reliability therefore takes precedence over unspecified criticism.

The second point is that the hadiths of narrators like these fall within the category of good hadiths, which the majority of scholars accept as evidence. If scholars such as al-Tirmidhī and others have graded the hadith authentic, and the only criticism concerning it is what has been mentioned, then it is, at the very least, good.

The third point is that it has been transmitted through two distinct routes: one from Ibn ‘Abbās and the other from Abū Hurayrah. The narrators of one route are different from those of the other, so neither received it from the other. Neither chain contains anyone accused of lying; rather, the weakness stems solely from poor memory. Such a report undoubtedly constitutes evidence and is among the finest examples of good hadiths meeting al-Tirmidhī’s criteria. He defined a good hadith as one transmitted through multiple routes, containing no narrator accused of lying, and not anomalous—that is, not contradicting what has been established through the transmission of reliable narrators.

This hadith has multiple routes, contains no narrator accused of lying, and is not contradicted by any reliable narrator. The reason is that only two things are feared concerning a hadith: deliberate lying or a narrator’s error. Thus, if it comes through two routes, with neither narrator having received it