that he is a novice in this field, or that he had already adopted the view that the hadith was weak and then clung to whatever he imagined would lead him to declare it weak. I say:

He declared it defective on three grounds:

The first is Abu Hatim’s aforementioned statement, regarding Muhasir in the preceding hadith: “There is no harm in him.” The person referred to said: “According to Abu Hatim, he is one whose hadith is recorded and examined, as stated in the Introduction to al-Jarh wa al-Ta‘dil...”

I say: Yes, that is his classification; so what of it?! Why did you not explain to your readers what you understand from it? Did you not know that he did not mean what you understood from it—namely, that he was weak—but rather that he was not in the first rank of those whose narrations are accepted as evidence? For he said:

1. “If someone is described as trustworthy, precise, or dependable, then he is among those whose hadith is accepted as evidence.”

2. “If he is described as truthful, or as being in the position of truthfulness, or as having no harm in him, then he is among those whose hadith is recorded and examined. This is the second rank.”

This explicitly establishes that one who belongs to the second rank is accepted as evidence, though he is not on the level of one who belongs to the first rank. The first is the rank of one whose hadith is authentic, and the second is the rank of one whose hadith is good. This is why al-Hafiz Ibn Hajar graded the chain of the hadith preceding this one as good.

All of this is so even if we assume that no one had declared this Muhasir trustworthy—whereas you already know who did declare him trustworthy.

The second and third grounds: after quoting al-Daraqutni’s al-‘Ilal, in which he named him Muhasir, he said:

“In any case, there is inconsistency in the hadith, both in its chain of transmission and its text. The narrator from whom he narrated is...”