I had received a letter dated 7/7/1403 AH from one of the distinguished Saudis in Riyadh, in which he stated that the hadith I cited in this volume as no. 1449, narrated by al-Bukhari in al-Adab al-Mufrad, is very weak; and that a group of those who follow me (!) in declaring hadiths authentic or weak and in deriving juristic rulings had been impressed by it and had begun to act upon it—meaning the addition, “and His forgiveness,” when returning a greeting, which occurs in the hadith referred to. He enclosed with the letter a large, double-sided sheet in which he set out his view concerning its alleged weakness. At his request, I wrote to him with my opinion on the matter.

His argument may be summarized in four points:

First: that my statement there, “Its narrators are trustworthy figures listed in al-Tahdhib, apart from Ibrahim ibn al-Mukhtar al-Razi,” was merely a slip of the pen on my part, since he is in fact among the narrators listed in al-Tahdhib.

Second: that concerning this Ibrahim, al-Bukhari said, “There is something to be considered in him,” and Ibn Ma'in said, etc.

Third: that regarding Harun ibn Sa'd, who is above him in the chain, Ibn Ma'in and Abu Hatim said, “There is nothing objectionable about him,” etc.

Fourth: that Muhammad, al-Bukhari’s teacher, is not the trustworthy Muhammad ibn Sa'id al-Isfahani, as I had definitively identified him, but rather Ibn Humayd, whom al-Bukhari himself deemed abandoned. I wrote him a detailed reply refuting him, in which I made clear his error in what he had maintained—except for the first point, in which he was correct. Accordingly, in this edition I corrected the phrase “apart from Ibrahim...” to read “and Ibrahim...” May Allah reward him with goodness.