‘The people of truth are three: Habīb ibn Mūsā al-Najjār, the believer mentioned in Surah Yā Sīn, who said, “O my people, follow the messengers”; Hazqīl, the believer from Pharaoh’s household, who said, “Would you kill a man merely because he says, ‘My Lord is Allah’?”; and Alī ibn Abī Tālib is the third (1), and he is the best of them.’ Ibn al-Maghāzilī (2), the Shafiite jurist (3), and the author of al-Firdaws (Paradise) transmitted a similar report. This is a virtue that proves his imamate.”

The response may be given from several angles:

The first is to demand proof of the hadith’s authenticity. This report does not appear in Ahmad’s Musnad. Even had he narrated it, the mere fact that he included it in al-Fadā’il (Virtues) would not establish that he considered it authentic, as all scholars agree. He transmits reports narrated by others even when their authenticity has not been established. Anyone versed in the field knows that (4) Ahmad does not declare every hadith he narrated in al-Fadā’il and similar works to be authentic. Nor does he declare every hadith he narrated in his Musnad to be authentic. Rather, the hadiths in his Musnad are reports that people transmitted from narrators known among them for transmitting reports and whose lying had not become apparent. Some of them may contain a defect indicating that the report is weak or even false. Yet most of them—indeed, the overwhelming majority—are hadiths of sound quality that may be adduced as evidence, and they are of higher quality than the hadiths in Abū Dāwūd’s Sunan. By contrast, what he narrated in al-Fadā’il did not, in his view, belong to this category.

That a hadith’s transmitter erred in relating it or lied about it may be established without any knowledge (5) of the transmitter’s character, but rather through other evidence.