al-Taqrīb. But in our view, the sound narration is that of al-Firyābī, because he is trustworthy and includes an additional detail, which is accepted. Al-Masʿūdī also corroborated him from Qays ibn Muslim, as mentioned shortly before. It was perhaps for this reason that al-Ḥāfiẓ Ibn ʿAsākir said: “It is preserved.” We previously traced the hadith from Ibn Masʿūd under no. 518, along with other corroborating reports and an explanation of the weakness in Ibn Mahdī’s narration. Refer to it if you wish.

1651 — “Indeed, Allah is pleased with a servant who eats a meal and praises Him for it, or drinks a drink and praises Him for it.”

Muslim (8/87), al-Tirmidhī (1/334–335), and Aḥmad (3/100 and 117) recorded it through several routes from Zakariyyā ibn Abī Zāʾidah, from Saʿīd ibn Abī Burdah, from Anas ibn Mālik, who said: The Messenger of Allah ﷺ said this. Al-Tirmidhī said: “A good hadith; we know it only through the hadith of Zakariyyā ibn Abī Zāʾidah.”

I say: He is trustworthy, but he practised concealment in transmission, and in all their versions he narrates it using the ambiguous “from” formula. Yet it appears that he practised such concealment only rarely. For this reason, al-Ḥāfiẓ placed him in the second rank in his treatise, The Ranks of Those Who Practised Concealment in Transmission, namely: “the rank in which he lists those whose concealment the hadith masters tolerated, and whose reports they included in the Ṣaḥīḥ because of their standing as leading authorities and because their concealment was slight in comparison with the body of what they narrated, such as al-Thawrī …”

It has also been narrated through another route with the wording: “Indeed, Allah admits a servant into Paradise because of a meal or a drink for which he praises Allah, Mighty and Majestic.” Al-Ḍiyāʾ recorded it in al-Mukhtārah (115/1) through the route of Mūsā ibn Sahl al-Thaghrī al-Washshāʾ, who reported from Ismāʿīl ibn ʿUlayyah, who said: Ḥumayd al-Ṭawīl informed us, from Anas ibn Mālik, attributed to the Prophet.

I say: This is a weak chain of transmission. Its narrators are trustworthy except for this al-Washshāʾ, whom al-Khaṭīb profiled in