“Another narrator transmitted it from Hammad, from Thabit, from Utbah ibn al-Ghafir, who said: ‘The two men …’ and then he mentioned it.”

I say: I could not find anyone who transmitted it with a connected chain, nor could I identify Utbah ibn al-Ghafir. The preserved report is that of the two reliable narrators, Yahya ibn Abi Bukayr and Ibn Aishah, from Hammad.

Note: The phrase concerning the greeting of peace at the end of the hadith was omitted from both Majma al-Zawaid and Majma al-Bahrayn. Yet it is established in their original source, al-Mujam al-Awsat, as you can see, as well as in Shuab al-Iman and in other sources that attribute the hadith to al-Tabarani, such as Tafsir Ibn Kathir (4/547) and al-Durr al-Manthur (6/392).

As for the statement made by the annotator of Majma al-Bahrayn (8/272) in the footnote—after appending it to the end of the hadith within square brackets—“What appears between the brackets is from TṢ,” I can only regard this as an error. For this symbol, TṢ, means al-Tabarani’s al-Mujam al-Saghir, as he himself stated in the introduction (p. 28). Yet al-Tabarani did not record it in al-Saghir, and the annotator himself did not attribute it to that work when documenting the hadith. And Allah knows best.

This hadith contains two benefits drawn from the established practice of all our righteous predecessors, may Allah be pleased with them: one of them is offering the greeting of peace when parting. This is explicitly established by the saying of the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him: “When one of you comes to a gathering, let him offer the greeting of peace; and when he wishes to leave, let him offer the greeting of peace. The first greeting is no more deserving than the last.”

This is an authentic hadith, cited in the first volume of this Silsilah under number