Caliphs, which he narrated with his chain of transmission from al-ʿIrbāḍ ibn Sāriyah. I have refuted him elsewhere; see the second volume of al-Ṣaḥīḥah, Addendum no. 13.

Furthermore, the material enclosed in brackets is from al-Tirmidhī. He does not include item 3, which is found in Ibn Mājah and Aḥmad; however, Ibn Mājah does not include item 7. Thus, the total number of items in the Sunan is seven, and in the Musnad it is eight, although the wording of the hadith in all of them is:

“...six distinctions!”

Thus, the items enumerated by them are more numerous than the stated number, according to the details mentioned above.

To my knowledge, this is one of the rare instances of inconsistency in the text of a hadith despite the authenticity of its chain of transmission. The hadith masters who transmitted this hadith therefore differed in their treatment of this wording. Some cited it as it stands—“six”—such as al-Ḥāfiẓ al-Mundhirī in al-Targhīb (2/194), where he attributed it to the Sunan, and al-Ḥāfiẓ Ibn Kathīr in al-Tafsīr (4/174), where he attributed it to the three collections. Both endorsed al-Tirmidhī’s authentication of it, and I followed their approach in Aḥkām al-Janāʾiz (pp. 35–36).

Al-Suyūṭī, however, differed in al-Jāmiʿ al-Kabīr and al-Ziyādah ʿalā al-Jāmiʿ al-Ṣaghīr—and al-Nabahānī followed him in al-Fatḥ al-Kabīr—by replacing the wording “six” with “seven,” so that it would correspond to the number of items enumerated. Yet the discrepancy remains in relation to Aḥmad’s narration, for it contains eight enumerated items, as appears in the wording of al-Bayhaqī’s and Ibn ʿAsākir’s narrations, without any stated number; thus it was free of the inconsistency mentioned above. I do not know whether this was an intervention on their part, or on the part of one of the narrators in their chains of transmission. Allah, Most High, knows best.

There is also inconsistency in the chain of transmission of the hadith in Aḥmad’s version. For after relating it from his two teachers, Isḥāq ibn ʿĪsā and al-Ḥakam ibn Nāfiʿ, from Ismāʿīl ibn ʿAyyāsh through the aforementioned chain of transmission;