I say: In my view, this is a good chain of transmission and a strong corroborating report. Its narrators are trustworthy men whose reports were used by Muslim, apart from Ibn Abī ʿUmayrah, who was a Companion, as is explicitly stated in some of its routes, with the wording: “O Allah, make him a guide, rightly guided; guide him, and guide others through him.”

Its sourcing has preceded under no. 1969, and al-Tirmidhī graded it good, as I mentioned there. Al-Jawzaqānī likewise graded it good in his book al-Abāṭīl (1/193).

The commentator on al-Iḥsān (16/193) declared the hadith under discussion—from the narration of Ibn Abī ʿUmayrah—defective, saying:

“Its narrators are trustworthy, except that Saʿīd ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz became confused in his later years.”

Yet he has overlooked—as any writer may—or deliberately ignored the fact that the one who narrates this hadith from Saʿīd is Abū Mushir, whose name was ʿAbd al-Aʿlā ibn Mushir, and that it was he who accused him of having become confused. Given his distinction, it is improbable that he would narrate from him material that he had heard from him while he was in that state of confusion, as I mentioned above.

I now add:

Further supporting this is the fact that Imam Muslim adduced in his Ṣaḥīḥ the narration of Abū Mushir from Saʿīd ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz, from Rabīʿah ibn Yazīd, as recorded in Tahdhīb al-Mizzī. I can find no explanation for this other than what has preceded, or else that his confusion was limited and non-detrimental—the condition which some euphemistically describe by saying that a narrator “changed.” This is how al-Ḥāfiẓ Ḥamzah al-Kinānī described him, and it accords with the unqualified praise bestowed upon him by the leading authorities in narrator criticism and accreditation, such as Aḥmad’s statement:

“No man in Syria had sounder hadith transmission than he.”