Al-Dārawardī also corroborated him in reporting it with the same wording; Muslim recorded it. Muḥammad ibn Isḥāq likewise corroborated him, saying: Muḥammad ibn Ibrāhīm narrated to me from ʿĪsā ibn Ṭalḥah, from Abū Salamah, with the same wording. Its wording is:

“A man may utter a word, seeing no harm in it, yet because of it plunge into the Fire for seventy years.”

Aḥmad recorded it (2/236), as did al-Tirmidhī (2/51), who said: “A good, singular hadith through this route.” It has a corroborating report through another route, recorded by Aḥmad (2/355/533), through Jarīr ibn Ḥāzim, who said: I heard al-Ḥasan narrating from Abū Hurayrah that the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, said:

“A man may utter a word, not imagining that it would reach what it has reached, yet because of it plunge into the Fire for seventy years.”

This chain’s narrators are trustworthy and are among the narrators of al-Bukhārī and Muslim, except that al-Ḥasan practised tadlīs, and it has been said that he did not hear from Abū Hurayrah. Aḥmad also recorded it (2/402) through al-Zubayr ibn Saʿīd, who said: Ṣafwān ibn Sulaym also narrated from ʿAṭāʾ ibn Yasār, from Abū Hurayrah, from the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace. He then mentioned it with similar wording, except that he said:

“...with a word by which he makes his companions laugh, he falls thereby farther than the Pleiades.”

This al-Zubayr is weak as a hadith narrator, as stated in al-Taqrīb. The hadith has another route from Abū Hurayrah, with an addition at its beginning, but its chain is weak.

The correct ruling regarding it is that it is a statement stopped at the Companion, as I established in the other book (1299).