Furthermore, I had cited this hadith in my treatise Qiyām Ramaḍān (36), documenting its sources briefly and explicitly stating that its chain of transmission from Hudhayfah, may Allah be pleased with him, is authentic. For a detailed discussion, I referred readers to the present passage in this series.

Then, years later, while this volume was in press, I received a written communication dated (13/7/1413 AH) from one of our brothers who loves for Allah’s sake, though I knew him only in absentia, and who is engaged in this noble field of knowledge, as his letter indicated. In it, he critiqued three hadiths that I had deemed authentic in some of my works, including this hadith. I therefore seized the opportunity to explain that he had not arrived at the truth in seeking to establish defects in all of its chains—while acknowledging that his writing was refined and his criticism courteous. Moreover, at the end of his letter he explicitly stated that he had done so in order to benefit from me and from some of my brothers. May Allah reward him well for his humility and his good opinion of his brothers.

Our brother—may Allah reward him well—examined the hadith’s chains from numerous sources available to him and set out their defects. I have already alluded to some of them. Therefore, I shall not prolong the discussion except on certain fundamental points which he did not address correctly. The result, regrettably, was that he declared an authentic hadith weak. I therefore say:

The first point: He judged al-Bayhaqī’s chain weak on account of Maḥmūd ibn Ādam al-Marwazī, saying: “No one besides Ibn Ḥibbān declared him reliable; and the claim that al-Bukhārī transmitted from him was rebutted by al-Ḥāfiẓ in Hady al-Sārī (p. 239).”

This may be answered in two ways. First, Ibn Ḥibbān’s being alone in declaring a certain narrator reliable does not mean that rejecting his assessment is justified, contrary to what this brother of ours and other beginners suppose. Rather, this applies only when he declares reliable someone whom others consider unknown, or someone from whom only one or two people narrated. In such a case, one withholds acceptance of his declaration of reliability; otherwise, he is