may Allah be pleased with her. Thus, in these circumstances, classifying the hadith as attributed only to the Companion contravenes the principles of hadith scholarship—principles to which al-Ghumari frequently boasts of referring, yet without any benefit, as he did with the third hadith mentioned earlier.

I said above, “other than al-Ghumari,” because those jurists might be excused out of charitable assumptions concerning them. As for this al-Ghumari, he has closed that door between himself and his opponents, owing to his frequent unjust attacks upon them, as I explained in the introduction to the third volume mentioned previously, and owing to his obstinate rejection of the texts: either dismissing and declaring them weak, or subjecting them to figurative reinterpretation and taking them away from their apparent meanings. Here before you is an example: the hadith of Aishah, which he rejects on the grounds that it is attributed only to the Companion; yet you have learned from the explanation above that this claim is invalid.

There are also a second and a third matter that demonstrate his obstinacy and denial. The second is his مخالفة of the hadith masters who included this hadith in their Musnads, such as al-Tayalisi (1535)—whose version explicitly attributes it to the Prophet, as will appear in the following one—Ahmad (6/234, 241, 265, and 272), Abu Ya‘la (5/48 and 8/107), and others. It is well known that the authors of Musnads compiled them for hadiths attributed to the Prophet, and only rarely included reports attributed merely to Companions.

The third is his deliberate disregard for hadiths that explicitly attribute the matter to the Prophet, such as the hadith under discussion and the similar reports whose sources have been cited above, because they contradict his view that the original prescribed form of the prayer was four rak‘ahs. This confirms that he is one of the people of desires, for they mention what supports them but do not mention what counts against them. Ahl al-Sunnah, by contrast, mention both what supports them and what counts against them. Nor can it rightly be said that perhaps he had not come across those hadiths, for some of them are found in Fath al-Bari, which is certainly among his sources, and he saw it there cited as being in the Sahihs of Ibn Khuzaymah and Ibn Hibban,