an unidentified freedman of Aishah, who said: Aishah said, “I heard the Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, say...” and he cited it with similar wording. He said: “No one narrated it from Ibn Jurayj except Sadaqah; no one narrated it from Sadaqah except al-Qasim ibn Yazid; and Muhammad ibn Ammar alone transmitted it.”

I say: He was a trustworthy hadith master among al-Nasa’i’s shaykhs. He was ascribed to his grandfather; otherwise, he was Muhammad ibn Abd Allah ibn Ammar, Abu Ja‘far al-Baghdadi, a resident of Mosul. Those above him in the chain are trustworthy, apart from Sadaqah, who is weak. As for the freedman of Aishah, I have not identified him. In al-Mu‘jam, it appears thus, without diacritical dots, so his name has not become clear to me.

In sum, the hadith is authentic through these routes, the best of them being the first. Al-Mundhiri (2/168) deemed its narrators trustworthy. Al-Haythami did likewise (5/276), and al-Manawi endorsed this. Indeed, in al-Taysir he said: “Its chain of transmission is authentic, and the author’s designation of it as ‘good’ is an understatement.”

Note: rahaj—also pronounced rahj—means dust, as stated by Ibn al-Athir and others. Al-Mundhiri alone departed from this, saying in his explanation: “It is the fear and alarm within a person’s inner being.” This is unquestionably mistaken; no one else has said it, as noted in Ujalat al-Imla by al-Hafiz al-Naji. He supported this by citing the linguists, reporting from a group of them that it is pronounced with an a vowel on the h, while the unvocalized pronunciation was mentioned only by the author of al-Qamus. And Allah knows best. Perhaps al-Mundhiri, may Allah have mercy on him, was influenced in adopting this view by the report he cited immediately afterward, attributed to the Prophet, with the wording: “When the heart of a believer trembles in the path of Allah, his sins fall away from him just as dates fall from a palm cluster.”