and Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr, the hadith master of the Maghrib, who said: “A firmly established hadith.”

Among them, too, was al-Ḍiyāʾ al-Maqdisī, in A Treatise on Adhering to the Sunnah and Avoiding Innovations.

I cited their statements after tracing the hadith in al-Irwāʾ, as mentioned above. He is well aware of this, for he frequently consults this book and other works of mine and benefits from them, as does his shaykh—as everyone who has examined the hadith references compiled by the two of them knows. Yet there is neither praise nor thanks, as they say in some lands; rather, there is only fault-finding, slander, and the hunting for slips, coupled with envy and deep-seated rancour. This is evident from the way he refers to the two series, al-Ṣaḥīḥah and al-Ḍaʿīfah: whenever he cites them, he calls them “his Authentic Series” and “his Weak Series,” imitating the bigoted and rancorous Shaykh Ḥabīb al-Aʿẓamī, and then the little Ghumārī, al-Saqqāf! “How astonishing—a mere hyrax dangling down upon us from the arrival of one astray!” (1) He sets himself above these hadith masters and declares them mistaken, though he is, as the saying goes, “neither part of the caravan nor of the expedition.” Nothing drives him to this but a craving for prominence and a love of fame, while disregarding the scholars’ saying: “The love of fame breaks backs.” This, by Allah, is the height of astonishment and delusion!

And how could it be otherwise, when his teacher and mentor—whose praises he constantly sings, to whom he ingratiates himself and whom he flatters, and whose agreement with him in dozens of hadiths he boasts of (2)—could do nothing but explicitly affirm the hadith’s authenticity in his comments on Ṣaḥīḥ Ibn Ḥibbān: al-Iḥsān (1/178–179) and al-Siyar (3/420 and 17/283)? Had he, too, found a way to differ, he would not have hesitated! How closely he resembles that misguided al-Saqqāf, who declares the imams of the early generations misguided and opposes the hadith masters;