or research and reflection, except whatever occurs to them offhand! Such is Shaykh Abd Allah al-Duwaysh in what he entitled Tanbīh al-Qāri li-Taqwiyat Mā Ḍaʿʿafahu al-Albānī (Alerting the Reader to Strengthening What al-Albani Deemed Weak). Most of the hadiths that he deemed sound are of this type—hadiths whose soundness later became clear to me, and which I expressly stated as such in some of my writings. Then this shaykh came, traced this through my works, and attributed their strengthening to himself—may Allah pardon both us and him, out of His grace and generosity. Rarely does he add any benefit worth mentioning. One example is this hadith, no. 201 (p. 131): he quoted my aforementioned remarks in Ghayat al-Maram, to which I referred above. He then commented:

“I say: But every clause of this hadith has been narrated through another authentic route; for this reason, he graded it good in Sahih al-Targhib, 1:457, no. 1083.”

That is all he said, without adding anything further. He did not examine the inconsistency mentioned in al-Ghayah to see whether a route could be extracted from it that could be judged authentic and relied upon, as I have done here. This is something he did not do, and only very rarely does.

I had the opportunity to review the first hundred hadiths in his aforementioned book, and found that approximately half of them were of this type: hadiths whose strength he had drawn from some of my writings, without coupling that with any effort of his own or any benefit worth mentioning. There is no harm in indicating their numbers for reference:

(1, 3, 4, 10, 21, 23, 28, 30, 31, 32, 40, 41, 45, 46, 48, 49, 52, 59, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 76, 77, 78, 80, 81, 83, 85, 86, 87, 88, 90, 91, 92, 93, 95).

It was the shaykh’s duty—may Allah grant him success—to find an excuse for his brother and explain to his readers the reasons why a researcher’s ruling on a single hadith may differ. These reasons are many, and there is no