I say: Shayban was Ibn ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Tamimi, their client, known as al-Nahwi. He was trustworthy and among the narrators whose reports appear in both Sahihs.

Al-Walid was Ibn Muslim of Damascus, and he too was trustworthy. However, he practised concealment in transmission of the taswiyah type, whereby an intermediary is omitted to make the chain appear uniformly sound. It is therefore possible that he was the one who omitted al-Muhallab between Abu Ishaq and al-Bara—unless this was done by Abu Ishaq himself, for he too practised concealment in transmission. This may be supported by the fact that al-Ajlah corroborated Shayban, narrating from Abu Ishaq, from al-Bara.

It was recorded by al-Nasa’i (616), al-Hakim, Ibn Abi Shaybah in al-Musannaf (12/504), Ahmad (4/289), and Ibn ʿAdi in al-Kamil (1/417–418), through various chains from al-Ajlah, with the same wording as Shayban’s narration but without the addition.

The printed edition of Ibn ʿAdi omits the word “you,” and it contains other errors as well, which I have pointed out in the Index to al-Kamil that I am presently compiling. May Allah facilitate its completion for me. In the course of working on it, I have discovered hundreds of scholarly and typographical errors which decisively show that those responsible for correcting the book were neither scholars nor competent students of knowledge. They have reprinted the book in a third edition and claimed to have corrected the errors found in the first edition! Yet this hadith is one of the many proofs that their claim is false, for in the first edition it appears as follows:

[“You will meet the enemy, if Allah wills, tomorrow morning …”]!

The same wording also appears in the third edition (1/427), along with a new error:

[“You will meet ṣād the enemy, if Allah wills, tomorrow morning …”]!!

Furthermore, al-Ajlah was Ibn ʿAbd Allah, Abu Hujayyah al-Kindi; there has been some criticism of him with respect to his memory,