another.
Both matters are established in the hadith, and so we believe in it; we have not rejected it as the Mu‘tazilah and others among the people of caprice have done. This author—who claims to follow the Athari tradition—is one of them. How could he not be, when he deliberately overlooked the hadith under discussion and did not cite it at all among the other hadiths whose sources he traced and whose wordings he quoted from pp. 111–126—although it is highly authentic, as you have seen? Moreover, he failed to infer from the totality of those hadiths what this hadith indicates: that the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, expelled the devil from that madman. This was one of his great miracles. Instead, he posited a discrepancy between the narration, “Come out, enemy of Allah!” and the narration, “Begone, enemy of Allah!”
On p. 124, he himself cited someone’s statement: “Imam al-Albani authenticated the hadith,” and commented: “This is a fabricated lie. Look at what Shaykh al-Albani said, and you will recognize the lie: volume one of his Silsilah al-Sahihah, p. 795, hadith 485.” He then quoted my remarks on it, the conclusion of which, as stated above, reads: “In sum, with these corroborating reports, the hadith is good. And Allah knows best.”
I say: his calling the aforementioned statement a lie is therefore unwarranted; perhaps the opposite is correct! He himself explicitly declared it weak, without offering any explanation whatsoever (p. 22), and some people were deceived by him. Yes, he cast doubt on the hadith’s indication that the jinn enters the body by referring to the variations found in the narrations; I mentioned two of their wordings just now. But sincere students of this field know well that it has nothing to do with scholarship to set differing narrations against one another. Rather, we must take from them that upon which the majority agree. There can be no doubt that the first wording, “Come out,” is more sound than the other, “Begone,” for it occurs in five of the hadith narrations that he cited, whereas the other wording occurs in only two of them. Moreover, I do not see