the route of Hammad ibn Salamah from Muhammad ibn Amr ... (then he cited the first narration), after which he said:

“Ibn al-Sakan said: ‘Muhammad ibn al-Sharid is not known among the Companions, and I have not seen him mentioned except in this narration.’”

The hadith has also come through another route from Abu Hurayrah, in which the man is not named. It is narrated by al-Masudi, from Awn ibn Abd Allah, from his brother Ubayd Allah ibn Abd Allah ibn Utbah, from Abu Hurayrah:

A man came to the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, with a black, non-Arabic-speaking slave-girl and said, “O Messenger of Allah, I am required to emancipate a believing slave.” The Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, asked her, “Where is Allah?” She pointed towards the sky with her forefinger. He then asked her, “Who am I?” She pointed with her finger towards the Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, and towards the sky—that is, “You are the Messenger of Allah.” He said, “Set her free, for she is a believer.”

It was recorded by Abu Dawud (3/588/3284), Ibn Khuzaymah as well, al-Bayhaqi in al-Sunan (7/388), and Ahmad (2/291), all through the route of Yazid ibn Harun, from him.

I say: Yazid heard from al-Masudi—who was Abd al-Rahman ibn Abd Allah ibn Utbah—after his memory had become impaired, as Ibn Numayr stated, as quoted by al-Dhahabi in al-Kashif and elsewhere. Thus, his statement in al-Uluww, “Its chain of transmission is good,” is not correct, as I had mentioned in my book Mukhtasar al-Uluww (81–82). Yet it has now become clear to me that it is stronger than merely good, for two reasons:

First, I found in Ibn Khuzaymah two narrators corroborating Yazid: Asad ibn Musa—Asad al-Sunnah—and Abu Dawud, namely al-Tayalisi, the compiler of the well-known Musnad, though the hadith is not found in it. He was from Basra, and Abd Allah ibn Ahmad mentioned in al-Ilal, on the authority of his father, that he said: