Then one of my brothers—may Allah reward him خيرًا—drew my attention to the fact that Majmaʿ al-Baḥrayn (5/264) has: “Mūsā ibn Rabīʿah ibn Mūsā ibn Suwayd al-Jumaḥī”—that is, “ibn Mūsā”—in place of “from Mūsā.” The same is found in al-Mizzī’s Tahdhīb and in the printed edition of al-Muʿjam al-Awsaṭ. Thus, the photographic copy contains an error. I should have noticed this from al-Ṭabarānī’s subsequent remark: “No one narrated it from al-Walīd except Mūsā ibn Rabīʿah.” This plainly indicates that there is no intermediary between the two. But such was the divine decree. As mentioned earlier, he is trustworthy.

It remains to consider the soundness of al-Haythamī’s general statement: “The rest of its narrators are trustworthy.” For Aḥmad ibn Rushdayn—namely, Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥajjāj ibn Rushdayn al-Miṣrī—was described by al-Dhahabī in al-Mughnī as follows: “Ibn ʿAdī said: His hadith may be recorded despite his weakness.”

I say: Ibn ʿAdī mentioned this at the end of his biographical notice in al-Kāmil (1/198). At its beginning, he related an account in which Aḥmad ibn Ṣāliḥ said of him, “Liar!” Yet he added nothing further. Therefore, al-Dhahabī’s statement at the beginning of his notice in al-Mīzān—“Ibn ʿAdī said: They declared him a liar!”—is not free of difficulty, especially since al-Ḥāfiẓ said in al-Lisān: “Ibn Rushdayn was a prolific transmitter of hadith. Maslamah said in al-Ṣilah: More than one person narrated from him, and he was trustworthy and learned in hadith.”

I say: Perhaps his weakness, and what was criticized in his narrations, resulted from the great quantity of hadith he transmitted. Al-Nasāʾī indicated that his errors were few when he said: “Had he retracted his narration of the cave from Bukayr, I would have narrated from him.” It therefore appears that he did not deliberately lie; rather, he made errors, as others do. Such errors are excusable in view of the abundance of what he narrated. And Allah knows best.