“…the Companions of the Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him”: “I think that he attributed it to the Prophet.”

I do not know whether this occurs in the chain of transmission of the hadith in his copy of al-Bayhaqi, or whether it was an addition reflecting his own view. He then said:

“Al-Bayhaqi narrated it, and its chain is good, Allah willing.”

Note: Al-Haythami did not cite the hadith through Abu Ya‘la, because it is not found in his abridged Musnad. I obtained its chain of transmission only from the photographic copy of the version of al-Matalib al-‘Aliyah containing the chains of transmission, by al-Hafiz Ibn Hajar (folio 20/1). In the printed edition of al-Matalib al-‘Aliyah, it appears stripped of its chains of transmission (1/138/504).

I then found that, in al-Hafiz Ibn Hajar’s biographical entry on Habib al-Kila‘i Abu Damrah in al-Isabah, he cited the hadith under discussion through Ibn al-Sakan, from ‘Abd al-‘Aziz ibn Damrah ibn Habib, from his father, from his grandfather, attributed to the Prophet. Ibn al-Sakan said:

“I have found no mention of Habib except in this hadith.”

Ibn Hajar concurred with him.

I say: ‘Abd al-Razzaq’s narration at the beginning of this documentation makes clear that the hadith belongs to Damrah ibn Habib, who narrated it with a chain from a man among the Companions of the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him. Thus, his father Habib has no connection to this hadith. The words of ‘Abd al-‘Aziz ibn Damrah, “from his grandfather,” were inserted by this ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, for he is unknown and unidentifiable; he is not mentioned at all in the biographical works on narrators, not even in Ibn Hibban’s al-Thiqat. Perhaps this is what al-Manawi had in mind in Fayd al-Qadir when he stated definitively that Damrah in Ibn al-Sakan’s hadith: