She pointed with her hand toward heaven. He asked:
“Who am I?”
She replied, “You are the Messenger of Allah.” The Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, then said:
“Set her free, for she is a believer.”
Al-Bazzār recorded it (1/28/37) with an authentic chain of transmission as far as Ibn al-Marzubān. Yet, besides being weak, he practised tadlīs; and although it has been mentioned that he narrated from ʿIkrimah, he did not explicitly state that he heard it from him, as you can see. Al-Haythamī regarded it as defective on account of him and Ibn Abī Laylā (4/424).
- Among the reports that corroborate this wording—“heaven”—is the hadith of Kaʿb ibn Mālik, who said:
A slave girl of mine came while tending some sheep belonging to me, and a wolf devoured one of the sheep. I struck the slave girl in the face, then regretted it. So I came to the Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, and said, “Messenger of Allah, if I knew that she was a believer, I would set her free.” The Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, asked the slave girl:
“Who am I?”
She replied, “The Messenger of Allah.” He then asked:
“Who, then, is Allah?”
She replied, “The One in heaven.” Thereupon the Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, said:
“Set her free, for she is a believer.”
Al-Ṭabarānī recorded it in al-Muʿjam al-Kabīr (19/98/193) and al-Awsaṭ (2/171/1/7712), through the route of ʿAbd Allāh ibn Shabīb: “Dāwūd ibn ʿAbd Allāh al-Jaʿfarī narrated to us; Ḥātim ibn Ismāʿīl narrated to us from Ibn ʿAjlān, from Zayd ibn Aslam, from the son of Kaʿb ibn Mālik, from his father,” with this report. He said:
“No one narrated it from Ibn ʿAjlān except Ḥātim; no one narrated it from Ḥātim except Dāwūd al-Jaʿfarī; and it is not narrated from Kaʿb except through this chain of transmission.”