“I strike an orphan until he lies sprawled out.”

Its narrators are trustworthy narrators relied upon by the two Shaykhs, apart from this Shumaysah. Al-Mizzi included her in al-Tahdhib and said:

“Shu‘bah ibn al-Hajjaj and Hisham ibn Hassan narrated from her.”

He then cited this report from her, but did not relate any criticism or accreditation concerning her. Al-Hafiz followed him in this, which is strange on the part of both of them. It resulted from another anomaly: Ibn Abi Hatim included her in al-Jarh wa al-Ta‘dil (2/1/391), where she appears as though she were a man. It reads:

“Shumaysah: Shu‘bah narrated from him.”

He then narrated through his chain from Uthman ibn Sa‘id, who said: “I asked Yahya ibn Ma‘in, saying, ‘Shamsiyyah?’ He replied, ‘Trustworthy.’”

Its distinguished editor commented:

“Shumaysah was a woman, so the correct wording is: ‘narrated from her.’ Neither al-Mizzi nor Ibn Hajar mentioned Ibn Ma‘in’s accreditation of her, as though they had not found the author’s entry on her among the male narrators. The same occurred to him with Duqrah, as mentioned earlier under the letter dal.”

There (2/1/444), he also noted that the wording, “narrated from him,” is an error introduced by someone after the author, for he would occasionally mention some women among the biographies of male narrators, as at the end of the section on dhal: “Dhurrah: she narrated from Aishah ...”

One point that supports the aforementioned error is that Yazid ibn al-Haytham narrated—in the treatise Statements of Abu Zakariyya Yahya ibn Ma‘in on Narrators, edited by Dr. Ahmad Muhammad Nur Sayf—