ibn Aslam is weak by the unanimous judgment of the critics and he errs frequently.1 Ahmad ibn Ḥanbal, Abū Zurʿah, Abū Ḥātim, al-Nasāʾī, al-Dāraqutnī and others all declared him weak. Ibn Ḥibbān said: “He would invert reports without realizing it, doing so to such an extent that his narrations became rife with elevating mursal traditions and ascribing what is mawqūf, so he deserved to be discarded.”

As for al-Ḥākim’s grading of this ḥadith and others like it, the leading authorities in the science of ḥadith censured him for that, saying that al-Ḥākim authenticates reports which, in the eyes of the hadith specialists, are fabricated and spurious. For this reason scholars of hadith never rely on al-Ḥākim’s judgement alone.

I add: al-Ḥākim himself included ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Zayd ibn Aslam in his book al-Duʿafāʾ, as the erudite Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī calls it, and at the end of that work he writes:

“Those whom I have mentioned above are people whose disparagement has become clear to me, for reproach is only established by evidence. They are the ones whose flaw I will clarify to anyone who asks me, for I do not deem it permissible to censure merely by imitation. My counsel to the seeker of this discipline is that he should not record a single hadith from any of those I have named; whoever narrates their reports falls under the Prophet’s ﷺ saying: ‘Whoever relates a hadith knowing it to be false is one of the two liars.’2”

I say: Whoever reflects on this statement of al-Ḥākim—and on the one preceding it—will clearly see