merely confined himself to saying: “There is reason for scrutiny in their chains of transmission.” So where is this supposed clarification?!

The fact is that most of the routes to which al-Bukhari referred by naming the narrators around whom they revolve—eleven narrators in all—are weak. For this reason, I omitted them, indicating this with ellipses (...), while retaining the three whom you see, since they are trustworthy narrators whose reports are relied upon, as stated above. The exception is Talhah ibn Yahya, who has not been mentioned previously. He was reliable and was among Muslim’s narrators, though there is slight criticism of him, to which al-Hafiz alluded when he said:

“Truthful, but makes mistakes.”

Al-Bukhari also recorded his hadith and those of the other narrators whom he listed above in al-Tarikh al-Kabir (1/1/37–39), though he did not give the wording of every one of them. He concluded by saying:

“Their wordings differ, although the meaning is close.”

I say: It is no secret to one versed in this discipline and in what the scholars have stated concerning corroborating reports and parallel chains that the agreement of such a large number in narrating this hadith from Abu Burdah, from Abu Musa, renders the hadith authentic—indeed, mass-transmitted from Abu Burdah—even if we were to assume that they were all weak. So what then when those three trustworthy narrators are among them?!

In short, the man has erred grievously in treating this hadith, whose chain is authentic, as an example of a hadith whose text is open to criticism. By doing so, he has shown profound ignorance of the means by which hadiths are reconciled. He likewise erred in citing the hadith concerning the creation of the soil as another example of what he mentioned. Even though someone had preceded him in this, he is merely an imitator, unable to distinguish error from what is correct.

Nor did his ignorance and his overstepping against authentic hadiths stop there. Rather, he declared two other hadiths weak on the claim that they were anomalous. One of them was Wa'il’s hadith concerning moving the finger during the tashahhud, even though I had refuted some of those who preceded him in making this claim—people like him in their ignorance of this discipline—in Tamam al-Minnah. I then refuted him in particular regarding his claim that Za'idah ibn