and other days, is false. Likewise, all reports prescribing prayers for the night of mid-month, the first Friday night(1) of Rajab, the twenty-seventh night of that month, and similar occasions are false.

Likewise, any report prescribing a prayer with a fixed number of verses, surahs, or repetitions of tasbīh is false by consensus of hadith experts, with the exception of the Tasbīh Prayer. They hold two views concerning it, the stronger being that its report is false, although a group of scholars have held it to be authentic. For this reason, none of the leading Muslim imams adopted it. Rather, Ahmad ibn Hanbal and the leading scholars among the Companions considered it reprehensible and impugned its hadith. Mālik, Abū Hanīfa, al-Shāfiī, and others, however, had never heard of it at all. Those followers of al-Shāfiī, Ahmad, and others who recommend it do so only as a judgment of their own, not as a position transmitted from the imams.

As for Ibn al-Mubārak, he did not recommend the transmitted form just mentioned, in which tasbīh is recited before standing up. Instead, he recommended another form that accords with prescribed worship, lest a Sunnah be established on the basis of a hadith that has no foundation.

Tafsir works likewise contain reports attributed to the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, that hadith scholars know to be false. One example is the hadith concerning the merits of the Quran’s surahs that al-Tha‘labī and al-Wāhidī cite at the beginning(2) of every surah, and which al-Zamakhsharī likewise cites(3) at the end of every surah.

They also know that the soundest hadiths narrated from the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, concerning the merits of the surahs are those about: “Say: He is Allah, the One.” For this reason, they were narrated by the compilers of the Sahih collections and were therefore singled out(4)