“Its chain is unobjectionable.” His shaykh, al-Haythami, likewise stated in Majmaʿ al-Zawaʾid (4/226):

“It was narrated by al-Tabarani, and its narrators are trustworthy.”

In his biography of Hanzalah in al-Isabah, al-Hafiz attributed it to al-Hasan ibn Sufyan, al-Bāwardī, and Ibn al-Sakan, through the route of Salm ibn Qutaybah.

The hadith has other routes, which I previously traced in al-Irwaʾ (5/79–83) and whose defects I explained. I concluded that it is authentic when all of them are considered together, especially since among them is an authentic report attributed to the Companion Ibn ʿAbbas, and another attributed to the Prophet which al-Nawawi graded good in al-Riyad (1808—edited by me).

One of the immature novices in this field objected to this. He included it among the weak hadiths that he extracted from al-Riyad and placed at the end of the book in his own edition. There, he wielded a demolition pickaxe against authentic hadiths, without knowledge or guidance. For he possesses no knowledge of this discipline, and is generally fixated on disparaging criticism of a narrator and his hadith, no matter how slight that criticism may be and incapable of countering his accreditation, or even if he has a corroborating narrator by whom his hadith is strengthened in the view of the scholars, both early and later. Indeed, I have sometimes seen him disregard the accreditation or deny it, so that the disparagement and grading as weak may stand.

His method of grading hadiths weak shows that he does not accept the category which hadith scholars call “authentic through external corroboration,” much less “good through external corroboration,” which results from strengthening a weak hadith through corroborating evidence and transmission routes. Al-Tirmidhi alludes to the latter by simply saying, “A good hadith,” rather than, “A good, singular hadith,” as he explicitly states at the end of his book. This reminded me of the misguidance of one who claims knowledge and likewise attacks the sunnah and authentic hadiths according to his own whims. In profound ignorance, he wrote in his commentary on Dafʿ Shubah al-Tashbih (Refuting the Misconceptions of Likening God to Creation) (p. 64):

“The decisive verdict is that it is absolutely impermissible to authenticate hadiths through corroborating evidence!”