I have gone into detail in mentioning these routes in order to confirm the hadith’s authenticity and to refute a man who has recently come forth with a new edition of al-Nawawi’s Riyad al-Salihin—an ornate, embellished edition whose outward appearance may please you, but whose substance is exceedingly ugly. Sufficient indication of this for the reader is that he omitted nearly 130 hadiths from it, claiming that all of them are weak, although some of them are found in Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim. He subjected them all to a criticism that contravenes the established principles and well-known rules of hadith scholarship among the scholars (1), and placed them at the end of his edition. He then followed them with numbers referring to other hadiths which he likewise declared weak in his annotations. Yet all of these are authentic; they number 15 hadiths, some of which are in the two Sahihs or in one of them. Here are their numbers in his edition, with B denoting al-Bukhari and M Muslim:

105—which is this hadith of al-Irbad—; 129—M, with a rebuttal in al-Sahihah (3007); 207 (see al-Sahihah, 173); 217—“Instruct your children to pray” (documented in al-Irwa’, 247); 241—B (al-Sahihah, 764); 243 (al-Sahihah, 919); 273—M; 501—M; 509—M, with a rebuttal in al-Sahihah (3176); 957—M, concerning the virtue of fasting on the Day of Arafah; p. 405—M (al-Sahihah, 545); 1262 (al-Sahihah, 1243); p. 441; p. 450 (al-Sahihah, 2435); 1431 (al-Sahihah, 128).

As for the 130 hadiths that he classified as weak, they fall into two categories. The first consists of those whose weakness I had pointed out in the introduction to our edition of Riyad al-Salihin. He adopted that judgment and expanded upon documenting their sources and uncovering their hidden defects. In doing so, he was dependent on my books, such as al-Irwa’, the two series, and others, without explicitly acknowledging this except on rare occasions, merely to strengthen his own position! This is a case of claiming what he has not been given, as will be evident to anyone who notices some of his expressions and compares his source-documentation with mine. The clearest proof of this is that he fell into an error into which I myself had fallen, for one reason or another; for he copied from