then the records are folded up, and nothing is added to them or taken away.”

This wording places the recording of whether a person will be blessed or wretched first, but suggests that this is recorded once the forty nights have elapsed. However, its narrators did not preserve this wording as accurately as the other versions. Hence the uncertainty: was it after forty nights or forty-five? Other narrators mention only forty or forty-two, which is correct: whoever mentioned forty-two included both endpoints of the period, whereas whoever said forty omitted them. This is common when specifying periods of time. Thus, in this wording, what comes later was placed first, and what comes first was placed later.

Alternatively, it may be said that he did not mention this using the conjunction thumma (“then”), so the wording does not necessarily imply a sequence. He merely intended to say that these things occur after the forty.

In that case, one of two explanations must apply. Either these things occur immediately after the forty and then again after the one hundred and twenty—and there is nothing objectionable about their being recorded twice—with the first record including whether the child is male or female;

or it may be said that the wordings of this hadith were not preserved with complete accuracy. This is why its narrators differed over its wording, and why al-Bukhārī did not include it in his collection. A hadith may be authentic in its substance while some of its wordings contain inconsistencies. In that case, those wordings cannot properly be used to contradict what is established in the agreed-upon authentic hadith, whose wording does not vary and which is, moreover, corroborated by other authentic hadiths.

The answer may therefore be summarized as follows: whatever conflicts with the agreed-upon hadith either agrees with it in reality, or is