and said, “It has no basis from the narration of Yaḥyā ibn Saʿīd.” Al-Dhahabī remarks in al-Mīzān: “Al-Abard ibn Ashras— Ibn Khuzaymah said: a liar and fabricator.”

I say: Some contemporary partisans have tried to give currency to that hadith in its false wording and, in the process, to weaken this authentic narration. I have exposed that fabrication in Silsilat al-Aḥādīth al-Ḍaʿīfa, no. (1035). The purpose now is to complete the discussion of the sound wording. It has become perfectly clear that the hadith is firmly established beyond doubt; hence the scholars, generation after generation, have relied on it as proof. Indeed, al-Ḥākim said at the very beginning of his al-Mustadrak: “It is a major hadith in the fundamentals.” I know of no one who has impugned it except a few whose solitary and eccentric objections carry no weight—such as al-Kawtharī, whose excessiveness and bias against the first route of this hadith (the route that lacks the earlier addition, “all of them will be in the Fire”) we have already touched upon, as he was either unaware of—or chose to ignore—the hadith of Muʿāwiyah and the multiple chains from Anas, as you have seen.

Had he confined himself to that, we would scarcely have paid him any attention. However, he buttressed his view by citing one of the distinguished scholars, the erudite Ibn al-Wazīr of Yemen, claiming that he said in his book al-ʿAwāṣim: