“Your Prophet…”—the hadith. Al-Bazzār and al-Ṭabarānī—the latter’s wording being cited—said: “It is not narrated from Ibn Masʿūd except through this chain of transmission; ʿAbd Allah ibn Jaʿfar alone transmitted it.”

I say: He is al-Raqqī, a trustworthy narrator among the teachers of al-Bukhārī and Muslim, as are those above him in the chain. However, al-Bukhārī narrated from Ḥammād ibn Abī Sulaymān only in al-Adab al-Mufrad. Thus, the chain is good, and the hadith is authentic by virtue of its aforementioned corroborating report.

Note: In al-Ṭabarānī’s version, “Ḥammād” appears without further identification. When al-Haythamī sought to identify him, he made errors that require clarification. He said (2/127):

“The transmitters of al-Ṭabarānī are transmitters of the Ṣaḥīḥ, except for Ḥammād ibn Sulaymān. He is trustworthy, but he became confused in his later years.”

I say:

First: There is absolutely no narrator—let alone one described as having become confused in his later years—named Ḥammād ibn Sulaymān. One might suppose that he meant Ḥammād ibn Salamah, but this is exceedingly unlikely, because al-Haythamī excluded him from the transmitters of the Ṣaḥīḥ, whereas he is in fact among them: Muslim cited him as proof, and al-Bukhārī cited him in corroboration. Moreover, no one has ever accused him of becoming confused in his later years. He was an imam among the imams of the Sunnah, may Allah Most High have mercy on him.

Strangely, this error escaped the annotator of Musnad Abī Yaʿlā (9/149), who copied it from al-Haythamī without any comment. This was unlike the annotator of al-Ṭabarānī’s Duʿāʾ, who noticed that there was something amiss and printed an exclamation mark beside the name, thus: “... Ḥammād ibn Sulaymān, (sic) ...”

You have already learned that he was Ḥammād ibn Abī Sulaymān. He is named thus in al-Bazzār’s Musnad, and he is