the first of them said in al-Tahdhib (22/195):

“This version is the correct one, Allah willing. Qutaybah’s version, and that of those who followed him, is mistaken. And Allah knows best.”

Al-ʿAsqalānī added:

“This is how Ibn Wahb narrated it, from Yaḥyā ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn Sālim, from Yazīd (1), from ʿAmr.”

I say: This addition is extremely necessary, for without it the aforementioned correction would not be evident. How could it be, when Ibn Ṣāliḥ was contradicted by a group of narrators, any one of whom—such as Qutaybah—outweighs him, let alone all of them together?!

This could be said if they had agreed in contradicting him. But the fact is that they themselves differed regarding al-Layth, so their contradiction of him no longer retained such force.

To clarify: we have explained that the second version agrees with the fourth in identifying Ibn al-Hād’s teacher as ʿAmr, whereas the third version omitted him. It was therefore anomalous, since an additional detail reported by a trustworthy narrator is accepted; and the narrators in question are Ibn Ṣāliḥ, Qutaybah, and Yūnus—namely, Ibn Muḥammad al-Muʾaddib.

After setting aside this omission, there remained a conflict between Ibn Ṣāliḥ’s report, on the one hand—in which Ibn al-Hād said: “from ʿAmr, the freedman of al-Muṭṭalib, from Quhayd”—and the report of Qutaybah and Yūnus, on the other—in which Ibn al-Hād said: “from ʿAmr ibn Quhayd,” thereby conflating the narrator with the one from whom he narrated and making them into a single name. It therefore became necessary to determine which of the two was stronger; when