55), and he proceeded to declare all four of its chains weak, making no distinction whatsoever between a weakness that may still be cited for corroboration and one that may not! He even likened the matter to the isnāds of the ḥadīth of the bird—namely, “I am the city of knowledge and ʿAlī is its gate”—yet how far apart the two reports are. For the latter enjoys no authentic ḥadīth that supports its meaning; rather, it belongs to the rejected Shīʿī narrations, as Shaykh al-Islam Ibn Taymiyyah demonstrated in al-Minhāj. The ḥadīth under discussion, on the other hand, was actually acted upon by the early generations with regard to shaking hands and refraining from bowing and kissing when meeting, as has been explained in its proper place.

Since when has analogy had anything to do with weakening or authenticating ḥadīths?!

This alone suffices to show that the man has fashioned for himself critical rules that have no foundation among the scholars, even while he openly contradicts their principles and the rulings derived from them.

He then concluded his remarks—just as he regularly does in his “Weak Series”—by saying:

“Shaykh Shuʿayb agreed with me in declaring it weak!”

So he claimed! Yet the reality is that the Shaykh’s own published words flatly contradict him. In his commentary on Sharḥ al-Sunnah (12/290), after attributing the report to certain sources we shall mention shortly, he wrote:

“Al-Tirmidhī graded it ḥasan, and he was right; for although Ḥanzalah ibn ʿAbd Allah is weak, more than one narrator has corroborated him. See al-Aḥādīth al-Ṣaḥīḥah (159) (!) by Shaykh Nāṣir al-Albānī.”

And, for all the audacity involved in Shaykh Shuʿayb’s citing al-Albānī’s book