“Tell her that she will not enter it as an old woman, for Allah Most High says: ‘Indeed, We have created them anew, making them virgins, loving companions of equal age.’”

I say: This is a weak mursal chain of transmission. Al-Hasan is al-Basri, and Mubarak ibn Fudalah is trustworthy, but he practised tadlis and narrated it using an ambiguous “from.” Al-Hafiz al-Iraqi likewise identified it as defective on account of its mursal nature in his Takhrij al-Ihya’ (3/129), but then remarked: “Ibn al-Jawzi related it with a continuous chain in al-Wafa’, from the hadith of Anas, through a weak chain.”

I say: In the printed edition of al-Wafa’ (2/445, edited by Mustafa Abd al-Wahid), it appears without a chain of transmission. In its introduction, the author states: “I do not cite the hadiths, lest the listener become weary.” For this reason, the editor said in his introduction (p. Sad): “Ibn al-Jawzi chose to omit the chains of transmission from his reports for the sake of brevity.”

I say: If only he had not done so, for the value of a book lies in its chains of transmission, as is certainly not lost on critical scholars. Yet I strongly doubt that Ibn al-Jawzi himself omitted the chains, because of the above-mentioned documentation by al-Hafiz al-Iraqi. However, Ibn al-Jawzi’s wording in his introduction suggests that this was his own doing. If that is so, then he had two books bearing the same title: one with chains of transmission, which is the one cited by al-Iraqi, and the other this abridgement. And Allah knows best.

I would have wished for him to provide us, from memory, with something that would support this mursal chain and thereby strengthen its text, in addition to the hadith of Anas, whose chain he judged weak. Yet we do not know the degree of weakness in it, so that we may know whether it is suitable to be used as supporting evidence or not. I have come across a corroborating report for it from the hadith of