Second: his practice of tadlīs (obfuscating his sources). Al-Ḥāfiẓ should have clarified what kind of tadlīs he meant, for the hadith critics list several categories, the most common of which are:

1. The narrator reports from someone he actually met a narration he did not hear from him, or from a contemporary whom he never met, making it seem as though he heard it directly, by saying, for instance, “from So-and-so” or “So-and-so said.”

2. The narrator cites his teacher by an unusual name or epithet to conceal his identity. The scholars have declared this form unlawful when the teacher is unreliable and the narrator hides him so that his status is not recognized, or when he makes the listener think he is another trustworthy person whose name or kunya happens to match. This is known as tadlīs al-shuyūkh (obfuscating one’s teachers).1

I say: ʿAṭiyyah’s tadlīs falls squarely under this prohibited type, as I explained in my book Al-Aḥādīth al-Ḍaʿīfah wa’l-Mawḍūʿah wa-Atharuhā al-Sayyiʾ fī’l-Ummah, 24.

In brief, ʿAṭiyyah used to narrate from Abū Saʿīd al-Khudrī. After Abū Saʿīd’s death, he kept company with one of the notorious fabricators of hadith, al-Kalbī. Whenever ʿAṭiyyah transmitted from him, he would refer to him by the kunya “Abū Saʿīd,” leading his listeners to assume he meant Abū Saʿīd al-Khudrī. That alone, in my view, forfeits ʿAṭiyyah’s reliability—how much more so when coupled with his poor memory! For this reason I would have preferred al-Ḥāfiẓ—may Allah have mercy on him—to note that ʿAṭiyyah’s tadlīs is of this blatant variety, even if only in passing, just as he did in Ṭabaqāt al-Mudallissīn when he wrote, “Famous for reprehensible tadlīs,” as mentioned earlier.