In closing my rebuttal, I must clarify that, throughout his so-called ḍaʿīfah (his series on weak ḥadīths), the man is given to nothing more than imitating others in their takhrīj. He never moves beyond the narrations whose chains are already laid out before him; then he sets about criticizing them one by one according to his own peculiar method—one that departs from the scholars’ established principles and the judgments consistent with those principles, as has already been shown. Had he truly been a researcher seeking the truth and qualified to critique, he would have consulted the primary Sunnah works himself and drawn from them the various chains, routes, and wordings that could assist him in verification—if he had really wished to do so. But he does not, because he wants to climb on the shoulders of others, and because he knows that if he did, the goal he is aiming for—outshining al-Albānī and his teacher Shuʿayb by surpassing them in declaring ḥadīths weak—would slip from his grasp. This intent practically oozes from his own words in the introduction to his ḍaʿīfah.

I say: had he taken that course, he would have discovered the error of the approvals and weakenings he has attributed to the earlier scholars. He would have found that Abū Hurayrah’s authentic ḥadīth, along both of its routes, possesses additional corroborations that only add strength upon strength, such as the report of Jābir—cited under the next narration, number 80, and meeting Muslim’s criterion—and the reports of Abū Umāmah and Wāthilah. He would have found their sourcing in Ibn al-Qayyim’s Jalaʾ al-Afhām and al-Sakhāwī’s al-Qawl al-Badīʿ. Concerning Jābir’s report, he (al-Sakhāwī) said: “It was transmitted by al-Ṭayālisī … and by al-Ḍiyāʾ in al-Mukhtārah … and its transmitters are the transmitters of the authentic collection, fulfilling Muslim’s criterion.” Ibn al-Qayyim related something similar and endorsed it.

Accordingly, it is no wonder that the ḥāfiẓ alludes to reinforcing the ḥadīth in Fatḥ