who said: “I heard Abū ʿAlqamah.” Shuʿbah said: “Yūnus ibn Khabbāb told me that he heard Abū ʿAlqamah from Abū Hurayrah.” Yaʿlā did not trace it back to Abū Hurayrah; he said: “Whoever asks Allah for Paradise seven times, Paradise says ...”—the rest of the hadith.

Thus, the correct chains of transmission all run through Yūnus ibn Khabbāb, from Abū ʿAlqamah, from Abū Hurayrah, whereas Abū Yaʿlā’s route runs through Jarīr ibn Ḥāzim, who is not mentioned in those routes as narrating from Yūnus. This led that commentator to assume that the Yūnus in this route was Yūnus ibn Khabbāb of those other routes, but this is not so, since it is possible that he was another narrator who corroborated the report. Indeed, this is the more likely view, for Jarīr ibn Ḥāzim is known, from his biographical entry, to have narrated from Yūnus ibn Yazīd al-Aylī, as stated above. This, then, was the consideration of those hadith masters who explicitly declared the hadith authentic and held it to meet the conditions of the two Sahih collections.

Did this escape that commentator, causing him to fall into error? Or was he taken in by the conceit of certain young men who possess only a superficial knowledge of this noble discipline? That I do not know. Yet I was surprised by another commentator who came across the authentication of the hadith masters just mentioned—namely, Ḍiyāʾ al-Dīn al-Maqdisī, al-Mundhirī, and Ibn al-Qayyim—and even added a fourth to them: the hadith master Ibn Kathīr. He then proceeded to rebut them, arguing that Yūnus ibn Khabbāb was not among the narrators of the two shaykhs, and that he had been criticized. He said: “The chain of transmission is therefore weak—indeed, extremely weak!”

This was the commentator on Abū Nuʿaym’s aforementioned book, Ṣifat al-Jannah. It would have been enough to restrain this young man from hastily rebutting and declaring those hadith masters mistaken had he reflected a little on what led them to authenticate the hadith. Had he done so, he would have found that they were correct and that he was the one in error for opposing them. But the real calamity is in trying to become a raisin before one has ripened into a grape. Allah is the One whose help is sought, and there is no power or strength except through Allah.