“...and that he should not press his shoulder against that of the person beside him” contradicts what the Companions of the Prophet would do when praying behind him, in compliance with his saying: “Straighten your rows, for I see you from behind me.” Al-Bukhari narrated it (725) from Anas, who said: “One of us would press his shoulder against that of the person beside him, and his foot against his foot.” It has corroboration in the hadith of al-Nuʿman ibn Bashir, and both are included in Sahih Abi Dawud (668).

Some contemporary writers have objected to this physical contact, claiming that it is an additional posture not reported in the Sunnah and that it represents excessive rigor in applying the Sunnah! They have further claimed that this contact merely means urging people to fill the gaps, rather than actual physical contact. This is a negation of practical rulings, exactly resembling the negation of the divine attributes—indeed, it is worse, because the narrator is speaking of something he witnessed with his own eyes: the physical contact. Yet he says: “Actual physical contact is not what is meant!” Allah is the One whose help is sought.

Worse still is what the one who has declared hundreds of authentic hadith weak, Hassan Abd al-Mannan, has done: he deliberately omitted the aforementioned narration of al-Bukhari from Anas from his edition of Riyad al-Salihin (p. 306/836). Nor was this all; he also misled readers by referring the remaining portion of al-Bukhari’s hadith attributed to the Prophet to al-Bukhari under number (723), so that, when readers referred to it, they did not find Anas’s aforementioned statement. The correct number is the one I have given above, namely (725). His instances of such suppression of knowledge are too numerous to count. I have drawn attention to some of them on more than one occasion; see, for example, Addendum no. (13) in the first volume of this series, new edition.