Paradise, I shall count his loss as a sacrifice and remain patient; but if he has not attained Paradise, I shall devote myself to supplication.’
He ﷺ replied, ‘Mother of Ḥārithah, Paradise contains many gardens, and your son has reached the Highest Firdaws. Firdaws is the elevated height of Paradise, its middle and its finest tier—i.e., above it is the Throne of the All-Merciful.’
In another route Anas said: Ḥārithah went out on the Day of Badr merely to observe; he had not gone out to fight, for he was still a youth. An arrow struck him in the throat and killed him. And so the report runs.
- I have been unable to locate the wording in this ḥadith that reads, ‘above it is the Throne of the All-Merciful,’ in any of the sources at my disposal, nor in those I have consulted just now. The author originally quoted it through the chain of Rūḥ ibn ʿUbādah—who narrated from Ibn Abī ʿArūbah, from Qatādah, from Anas—without attributing it to any compilation, as is usually his practice. Al-Tirmidhī recorded it (2/210) through this same route up to the phrase ‘and it is the best of them,’ without the extra wording, and said: ‘A ḥasan ṣaḥīḥ ḥadith.’
Aḥmad likewise transmitted it (3/260) via Shaybān from Qatādah, but he treated the final sentence as an interpolation, saying:
‘Qatādah said: Firdaws is the elevated part of Paradise, its middle, and its finest tier.’
Through this same chain al-Bukhārī recorded it in the Book of Jihad (2/204), yet he neither mentioned the interpolated wording nor noted that it was Qatādah’s own statement.
Abān corroborated him, narrating from Qatādah; Aḥmad recorded this version (3/283). Ḥumayd likewise followed him, saying, ‘I heard Anas say…,’ and he narrated it; Aḥmad, as well as al-Bukhārī in the Book of Expeditions (3/59) and in the Book of Heart-Softening Reports (4/241), transmitted it.
Thābit al-Bunānī also followed him, narrating from Anas the alternate wording cited in the book; Aḥmad recorded it (3/124, 215, 272, 282).
I say: None of these routes contain the interpolated addition, nor even the first extra phrase at all. I therefore fear that it may be a slip on the part of the author—may Allah Most High have mercy on him. Indeed, that wording appears at the end of the ḥadith of Abū Hurayrah mentioned earlier, no. 14, which is documented in al-Ṣaḥīḥah (918). It later became clear that the phrase was inserted by the author as an explanatory gloss—namely, his words ‘i.e., and above it is the Throne…’—but the word ‘i.e.’ dropped out during typesetting, which caused the confusion. Once I recovered it from the manuscript, the difficulty vanished, and all praise belongs to Allah.
- Ḥadith of Jābir, traced back to the Prophet ﷺ: ‘I have been granted permission to speak about an angel who bears the Throne; the distance from the lobe of his ear to his shoulder is a journey of seven hundred years.’ Its chain is authentic.