“Asad ibn ʿAmr differed from him regarding the name of Rūḥ ibn Ghutayf, calling him ‘Ghutayf’; and he erred in doing so.”

I say: This investigation demonstrates the following:

Firstly, Ghutayf ibn Aʿyan is someone other than Rūḥ ibn Ghutayf.

Secondly, this Rūḥ is the one whom al-Dāraqutnī declared weak, contrary to what al-Ḥāfiẓ attributed to him, as previously quoted from him. Al-Dhahabī also alluded to this when he said in al-Kāshif: “Some have judged him weak”—referring to al-Dāraqutnī. But, as you now know, he only judged Rūḥ weak.

Thirdly, al-Dhahabī’s attribution in al-Mīzān to al-Dāraqutnī—namely, that he said concerning Rūḥ, “al-Qāsim narrated from him ...”—is an error concerning al-Dāraqutnī. Rather, the one who narrated this from al-Qāsim was Asad ibn ʿAmr, as al-Dāraqutnī explicitly stated. So take note of this investigation, for you may not find it elsewhere.

What has preceded also shows that the defect in this chain of transmission is the unknown status of Ghutayf ibn Aʿyan, to which al-Tirmidhī referred when he said of him: “He is not well known.”

The following question then arises: How can his declaring him unknown be reconciled with his grading the hadith as hasan?

I answer in two ways:

The first is that this grading does not occur in the copy from which we are quoting; rather, it is an addition that I derived from al-Ḥāfiẓ al-ʿAsqalānī’s Takhrīj al-Kashshāf (75/108) and al-Suyūṭī’s al-Durr al-Manthūr (3/230).

The other is that perhaps it was on account of the corroborating report narrated by Abū al-Bakhtarī, who said: