“…Al-Ṭabarānī narrated it in al-Awsat and its transmitters are those of the Ṣaḥīḥ, except that al-Ṭabarānī’s teacher, Muḥammad ibn al-ʿAbbās, who reports from al-Faḍl ibn Suhayl al-Aʿraj, is unknown to me.”

I say: We have now identified him—praise be to Allah—and he is reliable and precise; therefore the ḥadith is authentic. Success is granted by Allah, Exalted be He. Moreover, he is not the sole narrator of it, for Abū Yaʿlā (309/1) also produced it through another chain from Muʿāwiyah ibn Isḥāq with similar wording: “and the Throne is upon his shoulders while he says, ‘Glory be to You; where were You, and where will You be?’”

Al-Ṭabarānī’s remark that “Isḥāq alone transmitted it” is open to objection, for ʿUbayd Allah ibn Mūsā also followed him, relating it from Isrāʾīl. Al-Ḥākim (4/297) recorded the report and said, “Its chain is sound,” a judgment with which al-Dhahabī agreed. In the printed edition of al-Mustadrak the name appears as “ʿAbd Allah,” which is simply a typographical mistake.

Al-Mundhirī (3/47) said: “Al-Ṭabarānī narrated it with a sound chain, and al-Ḥākim likewise, declaring its chain sound.”

151 – “Permission has been granted to me to relate something about an angel from among the angels of Allah—one of the bearers of the Throne: the distance from his earlobe to his shoulder would take seven hundred years to traverse.”

It was narrated by Abū Dāwūd (4727) and by al-Ṭabarānī in al-Awsat, as cited in al-Dhahabī’s al-Muntaqā minhu (6/2) and in his Ḥadīthu ʿan al-Nasāʾī (317/2), as well as by Ibn Shāhīn in al-Fawāʾid (113/).