I said: This is a weighty declaration of his reliability, based on a critical examination of the man’s hadiths, not on his anomalous practice of declaring unknown narrators trustworthy. Take note, then: the chain of transmission is authentic and beyond reproach. For this reason, I said that perhaps al-Haythami did not notice it; nor have we found that he specifically identified it, as I mentioned above.

Then another possibility occurred to me: perhaps he had not come across Ibn Hibban’s aforementioned declaration of his reliability. I have encountered many narrators whom al-Haythami did not recognize, although they have entries in Ibn Hibban’s book al-Thiqat (The Trustworthy Narrators)—a work to which he himself gave special attention, arranging it alphabetically to facilitate consultation.

This possibility was further strengthened when I found that, regarding another hadith of al-Bazzar, no. 1445, which he included in Majma‘ al-Zawa’id (4/262), he said:

“Al-Bazzar narrated it from Ahmad ibn Bakkar al-Bahili, whom I do not recognize; the rest of its narrators are narrators of the Sahih.”

Al-Hafiz commented on this in Mukhtasar al-Zawa’id (1/568), saying:

“I say: He is trustworthy. However, al-Bazzar did point out the hidden defect in this chain of transmission, saying: ‘Uthman ibn Uthman erred in it. Rather, Hisham narrated it from his father, from Hajjaj ibn Hajjaj, from his father.’”

I said: This Hajjaj ibn Hajjaj is unknown; no one other than ‘Urwah narrated from him. Some later scholars erred by declaring his hadith authentic. I have explained this in Da‘if Abi Dawud (351).

The conclusion regarding this second point is that al-Bazzar’s chain of transmission is authentic, and al-Haythami ought not to have passed over it in silence.

The third point is that he did not draw attention to the difference between al-Tabarani’s text and al-Bazzar’s text. Since he regarded the narrators of the former as trustworthy, he ought to have cited its text rather than that of the latter. Allah is the Guide.