5 — Abu al-Tufayl reported: “The angel of rain sought permission to greet the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him …”

I say: He then cited it in wording similar to the preceding hadith of Anas. Al-Haythami said (9/190): “Al-Tabarani narrated it, and its chain of transmission is good.”

6 — Hajjaj ibn Nusayr narrated: Qurrah ibn Khalid narrated to us; Amir ibn Abd al-Wahid narrated to us, from Abu al-Duha, from Ibn Abbas, may Allah be pleased with him, who said: “While the members of the Prophet’s Household were still numerous among us, we had no doubt that al-Husayn ibn Ali would be killed at al-Taff.”

Al-Hakim recorded it (3/179) and made no comment on it. Al-Dhahabi criticized it, saying: “I say: Hajjaj is abandoned.”

I say: In sum, the hadith mentioned above, which is the subject of this entry, is authentic through the totality of these chains, even though their individual chains are not free of weakness. Yet this is a slight weakness, particularly since al-Haythami graded some of them good. And Allah knows best.

Note: Al-Suyuti attributed the hadiths of Aishah and Ali to Ibn Sad’s al-Tabaqat (al-Fath, 1/55–56), but I did not find them there. Perhaps they are in the section of it that has not been printed. And Allah knows best.

Benefit: None of these hadiths indicates either the sanctity of Karbala, the merit of prostrating upon its soil, or the recommendation of making a tablet from it upon which to prostrate during prayer, as the Shiites do today. Had that been recommended, it would have been more fitting to use soil from the two noble mosques, in Mecca and Medina. Rather, this is among the innovations of the Shiites and their excessiveness in venerating the Prophet’s Household and their relics. One of their strange notions is that they regard reason as one of their sources of legislation; accordingly, they affirm rational judgments of goodness and evil. Yet despite this, they narrate reports concerning the merit of prostrating upon the soil of Karbala whose falsehood is plainly evident to sound reason.

I came across a treatise by one of them, a man called Sayyid Abd al-Rida (!) al-Marashi al-Shahristani, entitled “Prostration upon the Husayni Clay Tablet.” Among what it says (p. 15) is: “It has been reported that prostrating upon it is superior because of its nobility, sanctity, and the purity of those buried in it.”