Shaykh Aḥmad ibn al-Ṣiddīq—when I met him at the Ẓāhiriyyah Library in Damascus—about this reading, and he was amazed by it. For the transmitter who errs frequently loses all credibility, unlike the one who merely slips on occasion; the former’s ḥadith is weak, whereas the latter’s is ḥasan. Hence al-Ḥāfiẓ, in his Sharḥ al-Nukhbah, places the chronic blunderer alongside the poor memoriser and rules the reports of both to be rejected; consult it together with Shaykh ʿAlī al-Qārī’s marginal notes ⦗121⦘, ⦗130⦘.
What misled those writers is a sentence they quoted from al-Ḥāfiẓ’s Takhrīj al-Adhkār: “ʿAṭiyyah’s weakness only stems from his Shiʿite leaning, and—some say—from his tadlīs; otherwise he is truthful.”
Because their reach in this discipline is short—indeed, one might say they are ignorant of it—they do not dare to state their own view of the scholars’ slips. Rather, they parade the scholars’ words as though immune to error, especially when those words serve their agenda, as this sentence does, even though it plainly conflicts with al-Ḥāfiẓ’s statement in al-Taqrīb, which ascribes ʿAṭiyyah’s weakness to two causes:
- His Shiʿite inclination—according to the stronger view this is not, in itself, an absolute ground for disparagement; and
- His tadlīs—a flaw that can sometimes be remedied, as will be shown; yet even here al-Ḥāfiẓ only hinted at it with the phrase “it is said,” whereas in al-Taqrīb he affirmed categorically that ʿAṭiyyah was a mudallis, just as he affirmed that he was Shiʿi.
For that reason the Ḥāfiẓ himself included him in his epistle Ṭabaqāt al-Mudallisīn ⦗18⦘, saying: “A well-known Tābiʿī, weak of memory, notorious for reprehensible tadlīs,” listing him in the fourth category, which is