Yet Brother Hassan Abd al-Mannan overlooked it in his annotations to his own edition of al-Nawawi’s Riyad al-Salihin, declaring the addition weak on account of the aforementioned unknown status. He had taken this from my earlier documentation of the hadith, without acknowledging this—as is his custom—and without rectifying my omission by mentioning what strengthens the addition, such as this corroborating report. For his concern is to swell the number of hadiths deemed weak and to criticize those who authenticated them, clinging to whatever defect may seem apparent to him while disregarding the parallel transmissions and corroborating reports that may strengthen them—as is the case with this addition.

This is plainly evident in his collection of weak hadiths, which he printed at the end of his edition of Riyad al-Salihin: there he declared weak dozens of authentic hadiths, some of which are found in the two Sahihs, or in one of them, including this one. Strangely, the corroborating report mentioned above appears in his edition of Riyad al-Salihin immediately before this hadith! Did he deliberately turn a blind eye to it in an affectation of critical scholarship, or was it simply an oversight? We ought to have thought well of him, but his poor practice in his collection of weak hadiths has prevented us from doing so. I have seen him declare many hadiths of Muslim weak there through this same sort of blindness. Thus, at (558/116), he criticized my authentication, in Ghayat al-Maram, of Jabir’s hadith: “Keep him away from black [dye].” He correctly identified as defective Abu al-Zubayr’s use of an unqualified “from” in the chain, but his blindness likewise caused him to overlook its corroborating report from the hadith of Anas, to which I referred there, saying:

“It is documented in al-Ahadith al-Sahihah (496)!”

See the forthcoming addenda (11 and 13), where you will find other authentic hadiths that he declared weak, some of them also in Sahih Muslim.

7—808— “I was sent at the very onset of the Hour.”

I then came across a discrepancy in the chain of transmission of the hadith, in two respects:

First: concerning the name of the narrator who reported the hadith from Abu Jubayrah. Ibn Uyaynah—as mentioned above—named him Qays ibn Abi Hazim.

Al-Masudi differed from him, reporting: from Ismail, from al-Shabi, from Abu Jubayrah.