Al-Ḥārith ibn Abī Usāmah also transmitted the first part of it in his Musnad (fols. 80/1–2), with the wording:

“I saw the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, wiping a horse’s face with his sleeve.”

This is how he narrated it: “with his sleeve”! It is anomalous, contradicting the narration of the hadith masters mentioned above. Perhaps this is why al-Ḥāfiẓ included it in al-Maṭālib (1931). Yet it appears there as “from his father” in place of “from Jarīr,” which is likewise anomalous, or a figurative expression. This escaped the attention of the annotator al-Aʿẓamī, so after the words “from his father,” he added: “[from his grandfather],” and commented:

“The addition is mine, because the hadith in al-Itḥāf is from Jarīr ibn ʿAbd Allāh!”

I say: Yes, the hadith is from Jarīr; but by this addition, you have made the hadith a narration of Abū Zurʿah ibn ʿAmr ibn Jarīr from his father—who is ʿAmr ibn Jarīr—from his grandfather Jarīr. Yet there is no basis for Abū Zurʿah narrating from his father ʿAmr in this hadith, or in any other! So let this be the “critical editing of the learned investigator Ḥabīb al-Raḥmān al-Aʿẓamī”!

Let us now set out al-Ḥārith ibn Abī Usāmah’s chain of transmission, so that you may be certain of the invalidity of that addition. He said: Al-ʿAbbās ibn al-Faḍl narrated to us; ʿAbd al-Wārith ibn Saʿīd narrated to us; Yūnus ibn ʿUbayd narrated to us, from ʿAmr ibn Saʿīd, from Abū Zurʿah ibn ʿAmr ibn Jarīr, from his father Jarīr, who said …

I say: Thus, as you can see, “Jarīr” is in apposition to “his father”; the actual father, ʿAmr ibn Saʿīd, is not mentioned in this chain. Thus, the expression “his father” in this chain is either figurative, as stated above—as is evident from his making “Jarīr” appositional to it—or it is an error by the narrator, namely al-ʿAbbās ibn al-Faḍl, al-Ḥārith’s shaykh. He was al-Anṣārī, the Wāqifite, and the scholars are agreed in declaring him weak. Indeed, al-Dhahabī said in al-Kāshif: “Very weak.”