and daʿif (weak). If a narrator who is called saduq (reliable) cannot raise a report to the level of sahih, does that necessarily mean— as the Doctor imagines— that his report must be weak and subject to censure, when between the two levels there is an intermediate grade, namely hasan? Of course not. Therefore we must first determine the standing of a hadith transmitted by someone described as saduq, lest we wrong a Prophetic report by declaring it weak when it is in fact established. The only sound way to do so is to consult the statements of the acknowledged experts in this noble discipline. I shall therefore cite two authoritative passages, the first from the critical hadith master Shams al-Din al-Dhahabi, the second from the hadith scholar Abu al-Fadl Ibn Hajar al-ʿAsqalani. Al-Dhahabi states in the introduction to his work Mizan al-iʿtidal fi naqd al-rijal: “Among the expressions used for acceptable narrators, the highest are: (a) thabt hujjah, thabt hafiz, thiqah mutqin, and thiqah thiqah; (b) then thiqah; (c) then saduq, la baʾsa bihi, laysa bihi baʾs, mahalluhu al-sidq, jayyid al-hadith, salih al-hadith, shaykh, sud, shaykh hasan al-hadith, saduq in sha Allah, suwaylih, and the like.” Ibn Hajar, in his Taqrib al-tahdhib—the very source from which the Doctor took the judgement “saduq” for Usayd—writes while listing the ranks of narrators: “Third: those described with a single epithet such as thiqah, mutqin, or thabt.”