in this chain of transmission. Thus, it is more appropriate to attribute the error to him than to Luwayn—whose name was Muhammad ibn Sulayman ibn Habib al-Miṣṣīṣī—for he was trustworthy. More appropriate still is that the error not be attributed to Ibn Hibban himself, in view of the retention and precision for which he was known. Thus, the annotator of al-Ihsan (4/219) was mistaken when he attributed the error to him, saying:

“It is most likely that this was a slip of the pen on Ibn Hibban’s part, for Hammad ibn Zayd is not known to have narrated from al-Dastuwa’i ...!”

I think that this error arose from another error of his, namely his statement after what has preceded:

“Its chain of transmission is authentic. Luwayn is the byname of Muhammad ibn Sulayman ibn Habib al-Asadi, then al-Miṣṣīṣī. Abu Dawud and al-Nasa’i narrated from him, and the remaining narrators in the chain are narrators of the Sahih collections!”

This confirms what I said, for al-Adhani, Ibn Hibban’s shaykh, is unknown, as mentioned above—let alone being one of the narrators of the Sahih collections. He was therefore more deserving of a biographical notice than his shaykh Luwayn. But he overlooked and forgot him; exalted is He who neither errs nor forgets.

Hammad ibn Zayd was corroborated by Abd al-A‘la ibn Abd al-A‘la in Ibn Khuzaimah’s Sahih (1/146), and by Muhammad ibn Abd Allah al-Ansari in Ibn al-Jarud, as mentioned above, and in al-Baghawi’s Sharh al-Sunnah (2/89/298). All of them said: Hisham ibn Hassan narrated to us from Abu Ma‘shar, with the same chain.

Hisham also has corroborators from Abu Ma‘shar, and the latter has corroborators from Ibrahim—namely, Ibrahim ibn Yazid al-Nakha‘i—in Sahih Muslim, Sahih Ibn Khuzaimah, and elsewhere. Some of these are cited in Sahih Abi Dawud (398 and 399).

In short, Ibn Hibban’s narration is defective because it contradicts other reports, even though it conveys the same meaning as the hadith