Talhah said, “I will.” Talhah then fought as the eleven had fought, until his hand was struck and his fingers were severed. He cried, “Ah!” The Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, then spoke—whereupon the rest of the hadith was mentioned—and Allah drove back the polytheists.”

It was recorded by al-Nasa’i (no. 3149), al-Bayhaqi in Dala’il al-Nubuwwah (3/236–237), Abu Nu‘aym in al-Ma‘rifah (24/2), and Ibn ‘Asakir in al-Tarikh (8/548 and 549), through ‘Umarah ibn Ghaziyyah, from Abu al-Zubayr.

I say: This chain of transmission meets Muslim’s criteria, except that Abu al-Zubayr narrates it using the ambiguous formula “from.” Al-Hafiz Ibn Kathir made no comment on this in al-Bidayah (4/26), but the report that follows corroborates it.

Second: It is narrated from Talhah by Sulayman ibn Ayyub, who said: “My father narrated to us from my grandfather, from Musa ibn Talhah, from his father,” in an abridged form with the wording: “On the day of Uhud, I was struck by an arrow, and I said, ‘Ah!’”—and so forth—without the words: “Then Allah drove back the polytheists.”

Al-Haythami said in Majma‘ al-Zawa’id (9/149): “Al-Tabarani narrated it. Its chain includes Sulayman ibn Ayyub al-Talhi, whose reliability has been affirmed, though a group of scholars declared him weak; and it contains a number of men whom I do not know.”

That is what he said. Yet there is no unknown narrator in it apart from the grandfather of Sulayman ibn Ayyub, whose name is Sulayman ibn ‘Isa ibn Musa ibn Talhah, as appears in the chain of transmission of the first hadith under the section of what Talhah narrated in al-Mu‘jam al-Kabir (1/75/214); I too have not identified him. As for his son Ayyub ibn Sulayman, Ibn Abi Hatim mentioned him (1/1/248) through the narration of his son Sulayman from him, without stating any narrator criticism or accreditation concerning him. I believe that he is the one whom Ibn Hibban listed, in the section on the generation after the Successors of the Successors, among the reliable narrators in his al-Thiqat (8/127):