of the foregoing critiques. It was as though he realized that the alleged defect cited by his shaykh and others had no evidentiary force, so he wanted to parade an accomplishment beyond the reach of his predecessors! Thus, concerning one of its narrators, Ismaʿil ibn Umayyah, he said (p. 266):

“He did not explicitly state that he heard it.”

I say: This Ismaʿil is trustworthy and highly reliable, as al-Hafiz stated. Both Shaykhs relied upon him, and he was never accused of concealment in transmission.

Herein becomes apparent the danger of Shaykh Shuʿayb’s approach: clinging to the flimsiest grounds for declaring authentic hadiths weak, encouraging the students who train under him in hadith sourcing to imitate him in this, and inventing purported defects that have no real basis for deeming reports weak. Allah is the One whose help is sought.

Readers, pardon me, for this discussion has drawn me away from what I had intended to write about—namely, the hadith discussed in this corrective note. It is one of the four authentic hadiths that the person referred to declared weak in his treatise (pp. 36–37), alleging that it contradicts authentic hadiths narrated from more than one of the Prophet’s Companions, to the effect that some people from his ummah will be brought out of the Fire through intercession.

I say: By this claim, he has further confirmed his ignorance of how to reconcile hadiths that may appear contradictory to some people. In truth, there is no contradiction when the matter is carefully considered and one refrains from pretending to engage in spurious critical investigation—as is the case with this authentic hadith. It does not refer to every individual in the ummah, but rather to those among them whose sins had been expiated by the afflictions they suffered during their lives, as al-Bayhaqi said in Shuʿab al-Iman (1/342):

“The hadith concerning intercession applies to one whose sins had not become expiated during his lifetime.”

I say: The hadith, then, is an instance of using a general expression while intending only some of those included in it: it mentions “the ummah” but means only a portion of it—those whose sins were expiated by afflictions and similar matters mentioned in the hadith. And how numerous are