Concerning this hadith, al-Haythamī said in Majmaʿ al-Zawāʾid (2/251–252): “Al-Bazzār narrated it, and its chain includes Yaḥyā ibn ʿUthmān al-Qurashī al-Baṣrī, whom I do not know. He narrated from Anas, while the rest of its narrators are narrators of the Ṣaḥīḥ. I say: Ibn Ḥibbān mentioned Yaḥyā ibn ʿUthmān al-Qurashī in al-Thiqāt, but listed him in the third generation.”
I say: This is an extraordinary muddle—as they say in Damascus—on al-Haythamī’s part. For, as is clear from the chain of transmission, it contains no Yaḥyā ibn ʿUthmān. Rather, it is narrated by Yaḥyā ibn [ʿAbbād, Abū ʿAbbād, who said: “Muḥammad ibn] ʿUthmān [narrated to us from Thābit”], from Anas, as has preceded. He himself presented it in precisely this manner in the cited passage of Kashf al-Astār. Yet when he transferred the hadith to al-Majmaʿ, everything I have enclosed in brackets escaped his notice. The result was that something with no existence in the chain came into his mind: “Yaḥyā ibn ʿUthmān al-Qurashī al-Baṣrī”! This is the most astonishing omission I have encountered from a hadith master such as him!
To complete the muddle, he described Yaḥyā ibn ʿUthmān as “al-Qurashī al-Baṣrī.” This description is mentioned neither in al-Bazzār’s chain nor in any other; rather, it is a description of Muḥammad ibn ʿUthmān ibn Sayyār al-Qurashī al-Baṣrī, who belonged to the same generation as Muḥammad ibn ʿUthmān al-Wāsiṭī, as I mentioned shortly before as a possibility. It is as though this possibility passed through al-Haythamī’s mind, and he recorded it in his book as an established fact in this chain—one fantasy piled upon another. Glory be to Allah.
Another example is his statement, after explicitly declaring that he did not know him: “I say: Ibn Ḥibbān mentioned him in al-Thiqāt,” and so forth. This does not accord with what precedes it. I think it was an annotation made by one of the scholars—perhaps Ibn Ḥajar—written in the margin. The printer then assumed that it was al-Haythamī’s own statement and printed it in the text, without noticing its contradiction with