“O Allah, You are One in the heaven, and here on earth I am but one servant who worships You.” The author states on p.21, “Its isnād is ḥasan.”

I say: Hardly so, for it contains two defects which I have explained in al-Aḥādīth al-Ḍaʿīfah 1216.

The same is true of the ḥadith of the mountain-goats (al-awʿāl) transmitted from al-ʿAbbās (pp.49–50); it is documented in the same source under no.1247.

And there are still other weak reports that the compiler either left unremarked, acknowledged as weak, or even graded ḥasan—whether intrinsically or through supporting evidence—though to us they are nothing of the kind. Admittedly, he did refrain from some of them, as his remark under entry 152, “Judge Abū Yaʿlā,” indicates: “He set forth a lengthy discourse but then cited worthless ḥadiths by which it is impermissible to establish an attribute for Allah.” I would have preferred that he keep his book free of any narration he himself deems weak, especially those on which he remained silent. Many weak ḥadiths exert a harmful influence upon the Muslim community that only a few scholars notice. In our Series of Weak Ḥadith we have given numerous examples and clarified the extent of their harm. Most of them have no bearing on creed; they concern legal rulings, ethics, and the like. Yet those touching upon belief are undoubtedly more damaging, for they may corrupt the creed of someone ignorant of true monotheism and its corollaries, or they may be wielded by people of caprice as a weapon against the adherents of tawḥīd who affirm for Allah every attribute established in the Book or the Sunnah without likening Him to creation or negating His attributes, while accusing those very people of anthropomorphism and corporealism—even though the proponents of tawḥīd openly insist on exalting Allah above both tashbīh (likening) and taʿṭīl (negation).

Shaykh al-Islām Ibn Taymiyyah—may Allah have mercy on him—has alluded to this. In his Mafṣal al-Iʿtiqād (pp.4–9, Majmūʿ al-Fatāwā) he states: “It is well-known that the people of ḥadith share with every group the qualities of excellence they possess, yet they stand apart with merits the others lack. For whenever an opponent claims some alternative path—such as rational argument, analogy, or opinion…—the people of ḥadith have the purest form of each of those methods.”