—the combined weight of which indicates that the hadith has a well-established basis, especially since the second and fifth routes have authentic chains of transmission, as you have seen.

B. As for the mursal reports, their narrators are likewise five:

The first is ‘Abd Allah ibn al-Mubarak, who said in al-Zuhd (279): Sufyan informed us, from Muhammad ibn al-Munkadir, that he related to them: A man said to the Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, “Do the people of Paradise sleep?” He then mentioned the hadith, except that he said: “And the people of Paradise do not die.”

The second and third are Qutbah ibn al-‘Ala’ and ‘Ubayd Allah ibn Musa, who said: Sufyan al-Thawri narrated to us, from Muhammad ibn al-Munkadir, from the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, with similar wording. Al-‘Uqayli recorded both of them (221).

The fourth and fifth: al-‘Uqayli then said: “Al-Ashja‘i, Mukhallad ibn Yazid, and more than one other narrator related it in this manner as a mursal report.”

I say: All five of these men are trustworthy, except Qutbah ibn al-‘Ala’. There is no doubt that their mursal narration is stronger than the narration of those who transmitted it with a chain. Had the one who transmitted it with a chain been a single narrator, their narration would have led us to believe that he had erred in its chain of transmission. But since a group also transmitted it with a chain, there is no way to deem them mistaken. The correct view, therefore, is that it is authentic both as a connected report and as a mursal report; there is no contradiction between the two. A narrator may at times be energetic and transmit it with a chain, while at other times he may not be and thus transmit it as a mursal report.

The other route is through Yahya ibn Sa‘id al-Ansari, from Muhammad ibn al-Munkadir, from Jabir, with the same wording. Ibn ‘Adi (fol. 388/1) and al-Tabarani recorded it; and al-Diya’ narrated it from al-Tabarani in Sifat al-Jannah (3/84/1), through Mus‘ab ibn Ibrahim: ‘Imran ibn al-Rabi‘ al-Kufi narrated to us, from Yahya ibn Sa‘id, with the same wording. Ibn ‘Adi said: