until the day Uthman was killed, when it came loose from my waist and fell. Al-Tirmidhi—whose wording is cited here—said: “It is a good, singular hadith through this route.”

I say: The designation “good” is omitted in some copies of al-Tirmidhi. This led me, when I annotated al-Mishkat (5933), to interpret his term “singular” as meaning that it was weak. One of the contemporary Najdi critics who criticized me did not notice this—and news of his death reached me; may Allah have mercy on him—and said: “Al-Tirmidhi did not declare it weak; rather, he said: ‘A good, singular hadith through this route.’”

Now that I have been able to trace the hadith through its sources in a scholarly manner, two matters appear more likely to me. First, al-Tirmidhi’s grading it as good is reliably established from him, for two eminent hadith masters transmitted it: Ibn Kathir in his Ta'rikh (6/117), and al-Hafiz Ibn Hajar in his Fath (11/281). Second, the hadith is authentic in view of the totality of its three routes.

The first is the preceding route from Abu al-Aliyah, from Abu Hurayrah. I have stated that the wording is al-Tirmidhi’s, whereas the first narration and the final addition are Ahmad’s. The narrators in the chain are trustworthy and are narrators cited by the two Shaykhs, apart from al-Muhajir, who is Ibn Makhlad Abu Makhlad. Al-Hafiz said in al-Taqrib: “Acceptable”—that is, when corroborated. And he has indeed been corroborated, as will follow.

The second is from Sahl ibn Ziyad Abu Ziyad: Ayyub al-Sakhtiyani related to us from Muhammad ibn Sirin, from Abu Hurayrah, reporting it in similar terms. Its wording is more complete, and it includes the first additional wording.