“A man from Quraysh will commit a sacrilegious violation in Mecca, and half the punishment of the world will be upon him.”

I say: The narrators in this chain of transmission are trustworthy, but in my view it has two defects:

The first is the break between Ibn Marwān and al-Mughīrah. Al-Haythamī likewise identified this as a defect, saying (7/230):

“Aḥmad narrated it, and its narrators are trustworthy, except that I have not found that Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Malik ibn Marwān heard from al-Mughīrah.”

I say: Rather, they did not mention any narration of his from a Companion. Ibn Ḥibbān therefore included him among the Followers of the Successors in his al-Thiqāt (7/435). Ibn Abī Ḥātim explicitly stated that the chain is disconnected, saying in al-Jarḥ (4/1/4):

“He narrated from al-Mughīrah ibn Shuʿbah by way of a mursal report, and from someone who heard Muʿāwiyah.”

Shaykh Aḥmad Shākir, may Allah have mercy on him, also upheld this discontinuity in his notes on the Musnad (1/369).

The other defect is al-Walīd ibn Muslim’s concealment in transmission, for he practised concealment by smoothing the chain. With such a narrator, it is not enough that he explicitly declares hearing from his own shaykh alone; rather, such an explicit declaration is also required for those above him in the chain, as is well known in the science of hadith terminology. For this reason, al-Ḥāfiẓ said in Juzʾ Māʾ Zamzam limā Shuriba Lahū (2/2):

“Al-Walīd practises concealment by smoothing the chain; thus, nothing from his hadith is accepted except that in which direct transmission is explicitly affirmed for both him and his shaykh.”

In sum, the hadith is authentic through the route of Hāshim ibn al-Qāsim and similar routes that do not mention ʿAbd Allāh ibn al-Zubayr, may Allah be pleased with him. *