and hadiths from the Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, have been mass-transmitted reporting that he foretold the descent of Jesus, peace be upon him, before the Day of Resurrection as a just leader and an equitable judge.”
I say: I have documented some of them earlier under no. 2236, and in my documentation of The Virtues of Greater Syria (22, 23, 25, and 26).*
- “I spent the night reciting to a company of jinn at al-Hajūn.”
It was recorded by Ibn Ḥibbān (1768), al-Ṭabarī in his Exegesis (26/21), Aḥmad (1/416), Abū Yaʿlā (8/474/5062), and Abū al-Shaykh in The Magnificence (5/1664/1104), through two routes from Ibn Shihāb, from ʿUbayd Allah ibn ʿAbd Allah, from ʿAbd Allah ibn Masʿūd, who said: I heard the Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, say: … and he mentioned it.
I say: This is an otherwise authentic chain of transmission, and its narrators are trustworthy, but it is interrupted: ʿUbayd Allah—who is Ibn ʿAbd Allah ibn ʿUtbah ibn Masʿūd—did not hear from Ibn Masʿūd, as is mentioned in his biographical entry. Indeed, al-Ḥāfiẓ al-Mizzī said in Tuḥfat al-Ashrāf (7/90):
“He did not meet him.”
As for the wording in The Magnificence, “Ibn Masʿūd narrated to me,” it is an error on the part of Muḥammad ibn ʿAzīz or his teacher Salāmah, who was Ibn Rūḥ ibn Khālid, the nephew of ʿAqīl ibn Khālid. He was the narrator from Ibn Shihāb. Al-Ḥāfiẓ said of Salāmah:
“Truthful, but prone to errors. It has been said that he did not hear from his uncle, ʿAqīl, but narrated from his books.”
And he said of Muḥammad ibn ʿAzīz:
“He is weak, and they questioned whether he had actually heard from his cousin Salāmah.”