“Truthful, but he became confused before his death. The criterion is that whoever heard from him in Baghdad heard from him after that confusion.”

I say: Mu'adh ibn Mu'adh—al-Anbari of Basra—therefore heard from him before the confusion. Al-Iraqi explicitly stated this in Restriction and Clarification (p. 402), and Ibn al-Kayyal (293–295) followed him in this. Accordingly, the hidden defect has been removed, and the chain of transmission is authentic, praise be to Allah. This is by His bounty, Most High, and His enabling me to serve and defend the sunnah.

I say this because in recent days I came across a small treatise by an author unknown in this noble field. He called it The Correct Methodology for Judging the Noble Prophetic Hadith, written by Adil Murshid. In its introduction, he mentions that he is one of Shaykh Shu'ayb al-Arna'ut’s students. From it, it became clear to me that he knows nothing of this science beyond imitation and copying from here and there, while also being ignorant of hadith terminology—as in his statement (p. 24):

“A hidden defect is identified by a narrator’s solitary transmission.”

This is an error, for if a narrator is trustworthy and is alone in reporting a hadith, it is authentic unless he contradicts someone more trustworthy than himself or a larger number of narrators. Thus, a hidden defect is identified through contradiction, not through solitary transmission.

I do not now wish to respond to him or to the errors in his little treatise, for time is too limited to allow a reply to such matters. Yet it became clear to me from it that he wrote it only out of deep-seated malice. He selected four authentic hadiths that I had authenticated in some of my books, and he declared every one of them weak. One of them had been authenticated by a number of scholars, including Muslim, Ibn Hibban, and others. It is the statement of the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him:

“Allah created the soil on Saturday...”

He claimed it to be defective because it allegedly contradicts the Quran—a claim I had refuted; indeed, I demonstrated its invalidity in more than one of my books, such as Mukhtasar al-Uluww (111–112), this series (1833), and the commentary on Mishkat (5735). The person in question has offered nothing new in support of his claim; rather, he merely regurgitates what others have said, which I had already refuted