Additional details have also been reported: some are authentic, some weak, and some fabricated lies.

Hadith scholars who have written on this subject, such as al-Baghawī, Ibn Abī al-Dunyā and others, are like hadith scholars who compile other transmitted accounts: they are more knowledgeable and more truthful in these matters, a point on which scholars do not disagree. They either supply chains of transmission for what they relate from trustworthy narrators, or transmit without complete chains from authorities whose reports of this kind approach authenticity. By contrast, much of what chroniclers transmit with chains comes from liars or unknown narrators. As for what they transmit without chains, it is darkness upon darkness. Yet these chroniclers, by my life, do at least transmit from others, whether with chains or without them.

As for those who follow their own desires and others like them, they rely on reports whose original sources are entirely unknown, let alone trustworthy or dependable. They think nothing of fabricating lies. Even the most learned among them bases his accounts on no reliable authority, but on hearsay from ignorant people and liars, and reports from those who perpetrate blatant falsehood.

It has thus become clear that they lied in the account in which they mention al-Husayn’s head being taken to Yazīd and his tapping it with a rod. Even if the head was taken to Ibn Ziyād—as the account establishes—no report with a known chain of transmission states that it was brought before Yazīd. I have seen only a disconnected chain of transmission for this, contradicted by other reports that are