believe me?’

They replied, ‘We have never known you to lie.’

He said, ‘Then I am indeed a warner to you ahead of a severe punishment.’ Ibn Abbas continued: Abū Lahab then said, ‘May you perish! Was it (1) only for this that you gathered us?’ He then got up, and this (2) surah was revealed:

‘May the hands of Abū Lahab perish, and may he perish!’”

(Surah al-Masad: 1) (3)

Another version reads: “‘Tell me: if I informed you that the enemy would attack you in the morning or the evening, would you believe me?’ They replied, ‘Yes.’” (4)

If it is objected, “This hadith was cited by a group of Quran commentators and authors of works on merits, such as al-Thalabī, al-Baghawī, others like them, and al-Maghāzilī (5),” the reply is:

The mere fact that these men narrated it does not establish the hadith’s authenticity, by consensus among hadith scholars. Their books contain fabricated hadiths that scholars unanimously agree are outright fabrications. They also contain many reports that definitive revealed and rational proofs demonstrate to be false; indeed, some are necessarily known to be false.

Al-Thalabī and others like him do not deliberately lie (6). Rather, their rectitude and religious commitment prevent them from doing so. However, they transmit what they find in books and narrate what they have heard. None of them possesses the expertise in chains of transmission held by the leading hadith authorities, such as Shuba, Yahyā ibn Saīd al-Qattān, Abd al-Rahmān ibn Mahdī, Ahmad ibn Hanbal, and Alī ibn