of this to the Commander of the Hadith Scholars, al-Bukhari?! Al-Hafiz Ibn Kathir said in Abridgement of the Sciences of Hadith (p. 59), defining the aforementioned form of concealment in transmission:

“It is to mention a teacher by a name or patronymic other than that by which he is commonly known, thereby obscuring his identity and making it difficult to ascertain his standing. Its ruling differs according to the motives involved: at times it is disliked, as when the teacher is younger than the narrator; ... and at times it is forbidden, as when he is not trustworthy and the narrator conceals his identity so that his standing will not be known. ...”

Is it then fitting for a student of this discipline to utter such words, which impugn Imam al-Bukhari and accuse him of concealment in transmission and of obscuring the narrator’s identity from people?! If he had nothing to support the preference he gave, would it not have been more proper for him to think well of al-Bukhari and to understand his failure to identify his teacher Muhammad by lineage as indicating that he was the trustworthy one, rather than the one he considered abandoned? That would have been more proper for him. Allah is the Guide.

This is the substance of what I wrote to him in the reply I sent him. What, then, was his response to it?

He wrote me another letter, dated 8/12/1403 AH, in which, after the greeting and introduction, praying that Allah grant me goodness, and describing me as “the eminent hadith scholar,” he said:

“Our venerable Shaykh: Your reply to my letter reached me in due course. I now append to what you wrote a response in keeping with the saying, ‘Perhaps one who conveys knowledge of the religion conveys it to one more learned than himself,’ and, ‘Perhaps one who conveys knowledge of the religion is not himself a jurist.’ We benefit from you and draw from your knowledge.”

So did he benefit from anything? No. For along with his reply, he sent a paper of his, eight—