2975 — “I shall never wear it again”—meaning, a gold ring.

Ibn Ḥibbān recorded it in his Ṣaḥīḥ (7/412/5468, al-Iḥsān): ʿAbd Allāh ibn Muḥammad al-Azdī informed us; he said: Isḥāq ibn Ibrāhīm related to us; he said: ʿAbd Allāh ibn al-Ḥārith al-Makhzūmī related to us; he said: Ibn Jurayj related to us; he said: Ziyād ibn Saʿd informed me that Ibn Shihāb informed him that Anas ibn Mālik informed him that he saw the Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, one day with a gold ring on his hand. The people then began wearing rings (1), but he cast it away and said the above.

I say: This is an authentic chain of transmission. All its narrators are trustworthy and are among the narrators of al-Bukhārī and Muslim, except for al-Makhzūmī, who is among Muslim’s narrators, and al-Azdī, Ibn Ḥibbān’s shaykh. He was a trustworthy ḥāfiẓ, whose biography appears in al-Siyar (14/166), al-Shadharāt (2/246), and elsewhere.

Yet this chain has two unusual defects. One is the discrepancy in reports from ʿAbd Allāh ibn al-Ḥārith al-Makhzūmī; the other is Ibn Shihāb al-Zuhrī’s anomalous departure from the other hadiths. As for the first defect, Aḥmad said (3/206): Rūḥ related to us from Ibn Jurayj—and from ʿAbd Allāh ibn al-Ḥārith, from Ibn Jurayj—who said: Ziyād ibn Saʿd informed me of it, up to the words: “The Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, cast away his ring, and the people cast away their rings.” He did not mention the hadith heading, “I shall never wear it again,” and he said, “a silver ring.” This is an apparent discrepancy between Isḥāq ibn Ibrāhīm—namely, Ibn Rāhawayh—and Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal in their reports from their shaykh, al-Makhzūmī. The former mentioned the hadith heading, unlike the latter; yet both were leading imams, trustworthy ḥāfiẓs, and authoritative scholars.