from any discerning reader. He then sought to excuse this with an excuse worse than the offense itself, saying in the “Introduction” (p. 6): “They required us not to mention their names!” Yet it is easy for the reader to discover the true nature of these “scholars” by consulting their annotations: he will find no learning or critical verification except what was already in the first edition, or what they reproduce from my books, such as Ṣaḥīḥ Abī Dāwūd and others. Indeed, he will see evidence of ignorance and scant knowledge.

Here is an example. In a footnote on p. 643, commenting on Imam al-Nawawī’s statement, may Allah have mercy on him, at the end of hadith 1891, “And in a narration recorded by al-Bukhārī and Muslim,” he says: “I say: Muslim alone reported it; attributing it to al-Bukhārī is an error!” I say: rather, it is this speaker who is mistaken, for the hadith is in al-Bukhārī (no. 3245; Fatḥ 6/318).

I further ask: who is the speaker who says, “I say ...”? The answer is: an unknown person, by the admission of the publisher whose words I quoted above. So we ask him—since he has inserted himself among “the group of scholars” by joining them in annotation and correction, at times explicitly naming himself, unless he himself is the one meant by the phrase “the group of scholars”—we ask him, or we ask “the group of scholars”—it is all the same: what weight does an unknown person’s statement carry in the science of hadith terminology? That is assuming that his statement is not itself erroneous; so what then when it is the very error, as you have seen?

Of the same kind is their—or his (!)—comment on hadith 1356: