their cars. Some of them may get out and wait for the funeral bier, in order to accompany its procession to the grave (1), out of social hypocrisy and flattery—not as an act of worship or in remembrance of the Hereafter. Allah is the One whose help is sought.
This is my understanding of this hadith. If I am correct, it is from Allah; and if I am mistaken, it is from myself. I ask Allah Most High to forgive me my unintentional and deliberate errors, for all of that is within me.
A further note: Opinions concerning the status of this hadith have differed as a result of the differing judgments of the hadith masters regarding its narrator, Abdullah ibn Ayyash ibn Abbas. As for its status, al-Hakim and Shaykh Ahmad Shakir deemed it authentic, contrary to al-Dhahabi, as you have seen. The annotator of al-Ihsan (13/64–65) followed him in this, and accordingly declared it weak in his edition of al-Mawarid (1/668–669). Al-Darani, however, who annotated his edition of al-Mawarid (4/448–449), judged its chain of transmission to be good.
This is the assessment that I have adopted in my hadith source-tracings in a number of my books and annotations for many decades. See, for example, the hadith cited above under no. (896), The Documentation of The Problem of Poverty, no. (102), and the annotation to Tahdhir al-Sajid (p. 7).
As for the annotator of al-Ihsan, he was exceedingly inconsistent in this respect. While we find him here declaring this hadith weak, we then find him judging it good on another occasion (12/380), authentic on a third (3/50), and saying on a fourth occasion (1/298), “Its chain of transmission is good as corroborating evidence.” On a fifth occasion (8/246), he says, “An authentic hadith”—meaning authentic due to external corroboration—yet he did not even judge its chain of transmission to be good! And such a