And can any sensible Muslim imagine that a Muslim—let alone two eminent Companions, Abu Saʿid and Abu Hurayrah—would say, concerning the merit of the declaration of Allah’s oneness which they narrated, that whoever says it during his illness and then dies will not be consumed by the Fire? Or that he would say, reporting from his Lord, “His Lord declared him truthful,” and, “There is no deity but I”—all of this on the basis of his own opinion, without explicit instruction from the Wise Lawgiver? By Allah, it is indeed one of the gravest enormities for a Muslim to attribute such a thing to these two eminent Companions. Does not all this show that the well-known proverb applies to this annotator: “He made himself a raisin before he had ripened as a grape”? Yes, by Allah!

What further confirms this is his impugning the hadith under discussion and the hadith concerning the merit of the Throne Verse—both narrated by Abu al-Mutawakkil from Abu Hurayrah—on the grounds of a break in their chains, something no one else has claimed. He said (pp. 535–536):

“I am of the view that this narration is mursal; Abu al-Mutawakkil transmitted it without having heard it from Abu Hurayrah, as made clear by the narration of Ibn Mardawayh cited in Ibn Kathir’s Exegesis (1/306). Moreover, I have not found a single narration from Abu al-Mutawakkil on the authority of Abu Hurayrah in which he explicitly states that he received it directly from him. Nor have I found anything else from him in the Six Canonical Books and Musnad Ahmad apart from this narration and another one in Ahmad (2/324), which contains an objectionable irregularity.”

So I say—and Allah’s help is sought against those who lay claim to knowledge in this age:

First: As for his statement, “I am of the view that the narration is mursal ...” (1), I say: “This is not your nest, so fly away!” For neither you nor anyone else can establish that a Successor did not hear from