Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Rahman also corroborated Yazid ibn Ruman’s narration from ‘Urwah, in an abridged form. It includes that the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, said to Aishah:

“Would you like to watch?”

She replied, “Yes.” She said: He positioned me behind him, with my cheek against his cheek...

Muslim reported it (3/22), as did al-Bukhari (950).

Both of them also report it through numerous routes, with various wordings and additional details. I had collected these into a single continuous account in the aforementioned book, al-Adab. I have traced its sources again here according to the wording cited above, because al-Ghazali mentioned several narrations of this hadith in al-Ihya’, including his statement (2/304): “In one narration, he said to Aishah, may Allah be pleased with her: ‘Would you like to watch the Abyssinians’ dancing?’ Zafn means dancing.”

Although al-Hafiz al-‘Iraqi had traced the hadith in another place where al-Ghazali had cited it (2/278), attributing it to the two Sahihs, and referred back to it in the first place I mentioned, he did not trace the narration in question. Indeed, his reference may mislead an uninformed reader into thinking that it was reported by al-Bukhari and Muslim. But that is not the case; this was therefore one of the reasons for tracing its sources.

More importantly, Shaykh al-Subki stated that it was among the reports that have no basis, in a significant section he devoted to al-Ghazali’s biography, in which he collected “all the hadiths appearing in al-Ihya’ for which he could find no chain of transmission” (4/145 and 158) in his al-Tabaqat al-Shafi‘iyyah al-Kubra.