“Truthful, but he makes mistakes and misreads written texts.” I say: Thus, the chain is good, provided that it is free of defects among those below him in the chain, or that it is corroborated. Al-Haythami said in al-Majmaʿ (1/150): “Al-Tabarani narrated it in al-Awsat, and in its chain is Muhammad ibn Uthman ibn Abi Shaybah. He is trustworthy, although more than one scholar declared him weak.” Elsewhere (1/192), he said: “Al-Tabarani narrated it in al-Kabir, and its narrators are trustworthy.” It should be checked whether his reference to al-Kabir is correct, or whether it was a slip of the pen or an error by a copyist, for the volume of al-Muʿjam al-Kabir containing the Musnad of Abu Musa has not yet been printed. There are also reports from some of the Companions conveying the meaning of Abu Musa’s hadith. Ibn Abd al-Barr narrated them in Jamiʿ Bayan al-ʿIlm (1/64–65).

2695 — “A king from the Children of Israel seized a man and gave him the choice of drinking wine, killing a child, committing adultery, eating pork, or being killed if he refused. He chose to drink the wine, and when he drank it, he did not refrain from anything they wanted him to do. The Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, then said to us: ‘No one drinks it whose prayer will be accepted for forty nights; and no one dies with any of it in his bladder but Paradise will be forbidden to him. If he dies within those forty days, he dies a death of the pre-Islamic age of ignorance.’”

Al-Tabarani narrated it in al-Awsat (no. 357—my photographic copy), and al-Hakim (4/