by al-Ṭabarānī in both his Muʿjam al-Ṣaghīr and Muʿjam al-Kabīr!”

Contained within this brief assertion are several mistakes:

First: al-Ṭabarānī did not authenticate the ḥadīth in the Muʿjam al-Kabīr at all; he did so only in the Muʿjam al-Ṣaghīr. I, for my part, have cited the ḥadīth from him directly, not through intermediaries as those people do, their grasp of this noble discipline being short—“When one reaches the sea, the rivulets seem insignificant.”

Second: al-Ṭabarānī declared sound only the ḥadīth itself, not the story appended to it. His own words, quoted earlier, make this clear: “The ḥadīth was narrated by Shuʿbah … and the ḥadīth is sound.” This is an explicit reference to Shuʿbah’s version, and Shuʿbah never mentioned the story. Therefore al-Ṭabarānī did not authenticate the story, and their appeal to his statement is groundless.

Third: Even supposing the story could be reliably traced back to ʿUthmān ibn Ḥunayf, he did not teach that man the blind man’s supplication in full. He omitted the clause, “O Allah, accept his intercession for me and accept my intercession for him,” because his natural command of Arabic told him that these words presume the Prophet ﷺ is actually praying for the man, just as he had prayed for the blind person. Since that was not the case, he left the clause out. Shaykh al-Islām said (p. 104): “It is plain that if, after the Prophet’s death ﷺ, someone were to say, ‘O Allah, let him intercede for me and let me intercede for him’—when the Prophet ﷺ has not prayed for him—his words would be meaningless. Moreover, ʿUthmān ibn Ḥunayf did not instruct him to ask the Prophet ﷺ for anything, nor to say, ‘and accept his intercession for me.’ He did not command him to recite the transmitted supplication in its entirety; he directed him to part of it only. There is no intercession here from the Prophet ﷺ, nor anything that could even be imagined as intercession. Had someone said after his death, ‘accept his intercession for me,’ it would have been a statement devoid of sense, and that is why ʿUthmān did not instruct it.”