of your brother, yet fail to see the beam in your own eye?! Here you are following al-Dhahabi in his error instead of drawing attention to it, though you have no excuse, since you refer to the hadith by its number in the Sunan, thereby suggesting that you consulted it there directly. Yet even so, you failed to notice al-Muttalib’s statement in it: “The one who informed me said …” Thus, in these circumstances, you have no excuse—unless the reality is contrary to what you led the reader to believe, and your mention of the number was merely an embellishment of the source citation, as you and others do who affect scholarship and give readers the impression of extensive critical expertise, while there is no real investigation beyond collecting and gleaning bits and pieces! In that case, you have an excuse like al-Dhahabi’s. But how great is the difference between your two excuses! His is an excuse accepted from those experienced in authorship—especially in a work such as the Siyar—whereas yours is like the saying: “An excuse worse than the sin itself!”
The other man is al-Busiri. In Zawa'id Ibn Majah (2/40), under the hadith of Anas mentioned above, he said:
“This is a good chain of transmission. Kathir ibn Zayd is disputed over, and it has a corroborating report in the hadith of al-Muttalib ibn Abi Wada'ah, narrated by Abu Dawud in his Sunan.”
I say: The error here is quite obvious to anyone who knows that the hadith of al-Muttalib and the hadith of Anas are one and the same hadith, both narrated by a single transmitter, Kathir ibn Zayd, and that he erred when he said on one occasion, “From Anas.” How, then, can his error serve as corroboration for his correct narration?! This is inconceivable!
It is truly strange that this error should have escaped the annotator mentioned above, so that he نقل al-Busiri’s grading of Ibn Majah’s chain as good, while he could see in the lines he himself wrote—so I presume—that both its chain and Abu Dawud’s chain hinge on the same narrator, who was himself inconsistent in transmitting it. Had he understood what he was writing and known the difference between a defective hadith and one that is not defective, he would not have fallen into this glaring, manifest error!