“Do not speak ill of Ali, for he is from me and I am from him, and he is your ally after me. Indeed, he is from me and I am from him, and he is your ally after me.”

Ahmad narrated it (5/356). I say: Its chain of transmission is good. Its narrators are reliable and are narrators of the two Sahihs, apart from Ajalh—namely, Ibn Abdullah al-Kindi—concerning whom there is disagreement. Al-Taqrib states: “Truthful, a Shiite.”

If someone were to say: “The narrator of this supporting report is a Shiite, and there is another Shiite in the chain of the report being supported, namely Ja‘far ibn Sulayman. Does this not constitute grounds for criticizing the hadith and a defect in it?”—I reply: No. For what matters in the transmission of hadith is truthfulness and precision; as for a narrator’s doctrinal affiliation, that is between him and his Lord, who will call him to account for it. Thus, we find that the authors of the two Sahihs and others narrated from many reliable narrators who differed in doctrine, such as Kharijites, Shiites, and others.

The present case is an example before us: Ibn Hibban declared the hadith authentic, as you have seen, even though he said of its narrator Ja‘far in his book The Notable Scholars of the Regions (159/1263): “He was a Shiite and extreme in his Shiism.” Indeed, he stated in his work on reliable narrators (6/140): “He used to hate the two Shaykhs,” meaning Abu Bakr and Umar, may Allah be pleased with them both.

Although I doubt that this is reliably established from him, there is no doubt that he was a Shiite, since the scholars are unanimous on that point. Yet Shiism does not necessarily entail hatred of the two Shaykhs; it may amount merely to preferring Ali over them. The chain cited by Ibn Hibban for reporting his explicit statement that he hated them contains Jarir ibn Yazid ibn Harun. I have not found a biographical entry for him, nor have I come across another chain transmitting this from him. Nevertheless, Ibn Hibban said after that statement: