This is the case. For a period of time, I considered this hadith weak, assuming that Ibn Qutaybah alone had transmitted it—as al-Bayhaqī stated—because I had not come across it in Musnad Abī Yaʿlā or Akhbār Iṣbahān. But when I found its chain of transmission in those two works, it became clear to me that it is a strong chain and that the alleged solitary transmission is incorrect. I therefore hastened to include it in this book, in order to discharge my responsibility and fulfil the scholarly trust, even though this may open the way for an ignorant or spiteful person to attack, disparage, and slander. I do not care about that, so long as I am fulfilling a religious duty whose reward I seek from Allah Almighty alone.

Therefore, dear reader, if you find anything in any of my writings that conflicts with this verification, cross it out, rely upon this, and hold fast to it, for I do not think that you will be able to find the like of it. Allah is the One who grants success.

Then know that the life which this hadith affirms for the Prophets—peace and blessings be upon them—is only a life of the barzakh; it is in no way part of worldly life. It is therefore necessary to believe in it without drawing analogies for it, attempting to determine its nature, or likening it to what is familiar to us in worldly life. This is the stance the believer must adopt in this matter: believing in what the hadith states, without adding to it through analogies and opinions, as the innovators do. Some of them have gone so far as to claim that his life—peace and blessings be upon him—in his grave is a real life: “He eats, drinks, and has intercourse with his wives!” Rather, it is a life of the barzakh, the reality of which none knows except Allah.

622 — “Whoever undergoes cupping on the seventeenth, nineteenth, and twenty-first, it is a cure for every disease.”

It was transmitted by Abū Dāwūd (2/151), and by al-Bayhaqī from him (9/340):