Abu Jubayrah from them, rather than being part of his own musnad. This is the correct version, since the group of narrators concurred upon it.

It is also stronger for the hadith, given the disagreement—as mentioned earlier—over whether Abu Jubayrah was a Companion.

8–839. “Gabriel came to me and said: ‘O Muhammad ...’”

I then found in Tarikh Abi Zur‘ah al-Dimashqi (1/442/1094) that he said to al-Hafiz Ahmad ibn Salih al-Misri al-Tabari: “What do you say about Malik ibn al-Khayr al-Zubadi?” He replied: “Trustworthy.”

I say: This is a rare and valuable benefit, absent from the well-known biographical works. Brother Ali al-Halabi brought it to my attention—may Allah take him into His care and reward him well.

9–866. “What an evil mount for a man is ‘they claim.’”

I then came across Shaykh Shu‘ayb’s documentation of this hadith in his annotation to Mushkil al-Athar (1/173–174). There he adopted al-Hafiz’s view that its chain is interrupted—that is, between Abu Qilabah and Abu Mas‘ud, and between him and Hudhayfah—and that the deaths of the two were separated by sixty-eight years. On this basis, the Shaykh withheld acceptance of Abu Qilabah’s explicit statement of direct transmission in al-Tahawi’s chain, claiming that such an explicit formula of direct transmission does not occur in the other sources he had consulted. He then concluded by declaring me mistaken for including the hadith in al-Sahihah.

My response to him is from several angles:

First: His aforementioned claim is invalid, because it rests on denying a fact of which he had no knowledge. For I had mentioned there, among the hadith’s sources, the manuscript of Ibn Mandah’s al-Ma‘rifah, specifying the volume, folio, and side. I cited its chain, with explicit formulas of direct transmission throughout, from al-Walid ibn Muslim to Abu Qilabah, who said: “Abu Abd Allah narrated to us.” This is therefore a source other than Mushkil al-Tahawi, and it contains a most important benefit: al-Walid explicitly used the formula of direct transmission at every level of the chain. Thus, first, we were safeguarded against his concealment in transmission by suppressing an intermediary narrator (tadlis al-taswiyah), and we verified that Abu Qilabah had indeed heard directly from Abu Abd Allah Hudhayfah