This is profound ignorance. There is no room here to explain it except briefly: although Abu Mu‘awiyah was trustworthy and relied upon by both al-Bukhari and Muslim, he was corroborated by another narrator equally trustworthy. Moreover, the hadith has absolutely no connection to Irja’. They only made this claim because of their ignorance of the discipline. How could it be so when al-Hakim and al-Dhahabi, as well as Ibn Taymiyyah, al-‘Asqalani, and al-Busiri, all declared it authentic? Even if their minds allow for the possibility that all of them erred in authenticating it, have they gone so far as to believe that these scholars would authenticate something supporting Irja’? By Allah, it is indeed one of the gravest enormities that those who have not mastered this discipline should presume to meddle in it and declare weak what the scholars deem authentic.
This authentic hadith shows that ignorance may reach such a point in some people that they know nothing of Islam except the testimony of faith. This does not mean that they know prayer and the remaining pillars to be obligatory, yet fail to observe them. No; the hadith says nothing of the sort. Rather, their case resembles that of many Bedouins and recent converts to Islam in lands of disbelief, who know nothing of Islam except the two testimonies of faith. Something similar may even occur in some capital cities. One man once telephoned me to ask about a woman he had married, who used to pray without performing the ritual bath after sexual intercourse. More recently, an imam of a mosque, who considered himself to possess enough knowledge to justify differing from the scholars, asked me about his son. The boy had been praying while in a state of major ritual impurity after reaching maturity and experiencing a wet dream, because he did not know that the ritual bath for major ritual impurity was obligatory.
Ibn Taymiyyah—may Allah have mercy on him—said in Majmu‘ al-Fatawa (22/41):
“Whoever knows that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah and believes in that, but does not know much of what he brought, Allah will not punish him for what has not reached him. For if he is not excused for abandoning faith after it has reached him, then it is even more fitting that He not punish him for neglecting some of its conditions until they have reached him. This is the well-attested Sunnah of the Messenger of Allah—peace and blessings be upon him—in cases of this kind.”