- “Spread the greeting of peace, feed others, and be brothers, as Allah has commanded you.”
Al-Nasa’i reported it in the section on judicial rulings of his al-Sunan al-Kubra (4/4/2), as did Ibn Majah (3252), Abu al-Hasan al-Harbi in al-Harbiyyat (1/18/1), and Ibn ‘Adi in al-Kamil (157/1), through Ibn Jurayj, who said: Sulayman ibn Musa said: Nafi‘ narrated to us. In another version from him, he said: Sulayman ibn Musa informed me, from Nafi‘, from Ibn ‘Umar, attributed to the Prophet.
I say: This is an authentic chain of transmission; its narrators are trustworthy, and Ibn Jurayj explicitly states direct transmission in the other version. Moreover, the hadith has corroborating reports, some of which have preceded in the second volume under no. 569 and in the third volume under no. 1439.
As for the final sentence of the hadith, it is well known and has been narrated by a number of Companions, including Abu Hurayrah and Anas, in the two Sahih collections and elsewhere. Both reports are documented in The Ultimate Aim in Tracing the Hadiths of The Lawful and the Forbidden, no. 404. Muslim added: “as Allah has commanded you.”
Note: On this occasion, I should mention that I have often been asked about the statement appearing on the covers of some recent editions of Professor al-Qaradawi’s book The Lawful and the Forbidden: “Hadith references by Muhammad Nasir al-Din al-Albani”!
I say: This is a sheer error, as I explained in the introduction to my aforementioned book, The Ultimate Aim... The hadith references printed in the margin of the professor’s book are his own work; not a single word of them is mine. Although they consist of brief quotations from various sources, they contain many scholarly errors from the hadith perspective, as well as a failure to state the grades of dozens of Prophetic hadiths. This is wholly contrary to my method in my books and in all my hadith source-documentation and critical work. It is therefore impermissible to attribute to me anything found in those marginal notes—especially since they contain much that conflicts with the conclusions I reached in The Ultimate Aim, as some perceptive readers have noticed. Allah is the One whose help is sought.