I say: Had the Shaykh, may Allah have mercy on him, come across the narration containing riḥāl (camel saddles), with an undotted ḥāʾ, it would have helped him dispel the difficulty and understand the statement correctly, without any forced interpretation or strain. In my view, this narration is the stronger one, for the following reasons:

First: It is established in al-Fawāʾid, and its copy is sound.

Second: It likewise occurs with an undotted ḥāʾ in a manuscript copy of al-Ḥāfiẓ al-Mundhirī’s al-Targhīb wa-al-Tarhīb, preserved in the al-Ẓāhiriyyah Library in Damascus, in a large volume containing a lacuna. Although this copy is composed of various exemplars or hands, the section containing this hadith is from a fine, carefully marked, and meticulously prepared copy. Evidence of this is that beneath the ḥāʾ in this word, the scribe wrote a small ḥāʾ—thus, riḥāl—to indicate that it is an undotted letter, as was the practice of meticulous early scribes with letters that might be confused. He did the same on the page preceding the page containing this hadith: the name Zuḥar occurs there, and beneath it he wrote a small ḥāʾ—thus, Zuḥar.

Third: Al-Ḥākim’s previously cited narration, worded, “They will ride upon cushioned saddles...,” confirms what we have deemed more likely. For mayāthir is the plural of mitharah. Ibn al-Athīr said: “Mitharah, with a kasrah, is a form derived from wathārah. One says, wathura wathāratan, meaning that something is soft and yielding. It is made of silk or brocade and placed by the rider beneath him upon the camel saddles.”

Once this is understood, al-Ḥākim’s narration explains the first narration. Taken together, they mean that the saddles upon which they ride are soft and yielding, and that they—that is, the saddles—are like camel saddles, in the sense of their spaciousness. Accordingly, the phrase “like camel saddles” is not an adjectival qualification of “men,” as al-Banna explained