his biography (15/164–165), with the chain mentioned above—and attributed it to Muslim! I found it in Musnad al-Siraj (fol. 43/1) with this chain, but there the name appears in the diminutive form: “ʿUbaydullah.” It is a good manuscript, and the same appears in the printed edition of his Musnad (1/328/314). Yet I believe this to be a copyist’s error, for in the original manuscript the form is “ʿAbd”: the letter ba has only one tooth between the ʿayn and the dal. Beside the ba’s dot, the photographic reproduction shows a smudge resembling another dot, to the left of the first and slightly lower and larger than it, which the editor mistook for two dots. Had it been correct, the original copyist would also have given it a tooth, thus: “ʿUbayd.”

This mistaken impression is further supported by the fact that, in Musnad Ibn Rahawayh, there are two other hadiths immediately before and after this one, through two other chains from this Abdullah, from his uncle Yazid ibn al-Asamm, with the same wording. One of them concerns the instruction that the blind man should attend the congregational prayer if he hears the call to prayer. Yet in Sahih Muslim (2/124), this hadith is transmitted through Ishaq and others with the name in the diminutive form: “ʿUbaydullah.” The same occurs in Abu ʿAwanah (2/7), through another route from Ishaq’s shaykh, Marwan ibn Muʿawiyah al-Fazari, from him.

In sum, there is considerable disagreement over the narrator of these hadiths—including the hadith under discussion—from Yazid ibn al-Asamm. This raises the possibility that he was one and the same person, with the transmitters differing over his name: some using the full form and others the diminutive. Whichever it was, the important point is that he was a trustworthy narrator used by Muslim. Those previously mentioned declared the hadith authentic, especially since it has numerous supporting reports, although most of them are attributed to Companions. Ibn Jarir transmitted them in his exegesis (4/60) from ʿUmar ibn al-Khattab and Ibn ʿAbbas, through two authentic chains to them. They indicate that this answer of the Prophet was known to them. Furthermore, it has been narrated