from ʿAṭṭāf, from ʿAbd Allah ibn ʿUthmān ibn al-Arqam, from his father, from his grandfather.” This was recorded by Ibn Mandah and others, and it is correct.

I say: It appears there as “from his father,” but I believe this was either a slip of the pen by al-Hafiz or an interpolation by one of the copyists, for it is not mentioned in any of the previously cited sources. Rather, it is: “from ʿAbd Allah ibn ʿUthmān ibn al-Arqam, from his grandfather.” This is likewise how it appears in al-Taʿjīl, where he said: “He narrated from his grandfather, who was a Companion. Yaḥyā ibn ʿImrān narrated from him, but his reliability is questionable.”

What emerges from this examination of the sources is that the hadith’s chain of transmission rests, first, on ʿAbd Allah ibn ʿUthmān ibn al-Arqam narrating from his grandfather, al-Arqam; and second, that ʿAṭṭāf ibn Khālid at times narrated it from him directly, without an intermediary, though using the ambiguous “from” formula without explicitly stating that he heard it, while at other times he narrated it from him through Yaḥyā ibn ʿImrān. He was corroborated in the latter route. Accordingly, we may say that the hadith is in fact narrated by Yaḥyā ibn ʿImrān from ʿAbd Allah ibn ʿUthmān, from his grandfather al-Arqam.

It therefore becomes clear that this chain of transmission contains two defects. The first is this ʿAbd Allah ibn ʿUthmān, who is unknown except through this narration. Al-Bukhārī and Ibn Abī Ḥātim mentioned him in their respective books through ʿAṭṭāf’s narration, but offered neither narrator criticism nor accreditation of him. However, al-Bukhārī cited his name with the order reversed: “ʿUthmān ibn ʿAbd Allah ibn al-Arqam”! The same occurs in the aforementioned narration of al-Ṭabarānī and al-Ḥākim, and Ibn Abī Ḥātim likewise repeated it. This confirms that the man is unidentified. It is therefore surprising that he was not mentioned in al-Mīzān or in al-Lisān. Even more remarkable is that Ibn Ḥibbān listed him