“Isma‘il ibn ‘Abd al-Salam, from Zayd ibn ‘Abd al-Rahman, from ‘Amr ibn Shu‘ayb.” Ibn Qutaybah said in Ikhtilaf al-Hadith: “Neither he nor his teacher is known.”

I say: The hadith has also come through a route other than theirs, from ‘Amr ibn Shu‘ayb. Al-Bazzar narrated it (229—Zawa’id) through Isma‘il ibn Hammad, from Muqatil ibn Hayyan, from ‘Amr ibn Shu‘ayb, with the same report; and it includes an account. Ibn ‘Urwah cited it in al-Kawakib (34/161/2) and said: “A singular hadith. ‘Imad al-Din Ibn Kathir said: Shaykh al-Islam Taqi al-Din Abu al-‘Abbas Ibn Taymiyyah said: ‘This is a fabricated, forged hadith, by the consensus of those knowledgeable in this field.’”

I say: If Isma‘il ibn Hammad was the Ash‘ari, their client, then he was truthful; but if he was the grandson of Imam Abu Hanifah, scholars have spoken critically of him. In either case, he was not alone in narrating it. Al-Bayhaqi also transmitted it through ‘Abbad ibn ‘Abbad, from ‘Umar ibn Dharr, who said: I heard ‘Umar ibn ‘Abd al-‘Aziz say, “Had Allah willed that He not be disobeyed, He would not have created Iblis.” Muqatil ibn Hayyan also related to me from ‘Amr ibn Shu‘ayb a report attributed to the Prophet, with the wording of the heading.

This is a chain of transmission whose narrators are all trustworthy, notwithstanding the well-known disagreement concerning ‘Amr ibn Shu‘ayb. Thus, in my view, the chain is good. ‘Abbad ibn ‘Abbad was Ibn ‘Alqamah al-Mazini al-Basri, and Muqatil ibn Hayyan was trustworthy and among the narrators used by Muslim. He is not Muqatil ibn Sulayman, the exegete who was accused. Perhaps Shaykh al-Islam Ibn Taymiyyah mistakenly supposed that he was the narrator of this hadith; otherwise, there is no basis for judging it fabricated on account of its chain, for it contains neither an accused narrator nor, on account of its text, anything objectionable. For the people of the Sunnah are agreed that every act of obedience and disobedience occurs by Allah’s will; none of it takes place against His will. Yet He loves acts of obedience and hates acts of disobedience. You have seen how the rightly guided caliph cited this hadith as evidence. ‘Abd Allah, the son of Imam Ahmad, also transmitted it from him in Zawa’id al-Zuhd (p. 298), through