3294—“If two men embrace Islam and then shun one another, one of them will be outside Islam until he returns”—meaning, the one who wronged the other.

Al-Bazzar recorded it in his Musnad (p. 245, al-Zawaʾid): “ʿAbd al-Warith ibn ʿAbd al-Samad narrated to us: my father narrated to me: Shabib narrated to us, from al-Aʿmash, from Zayd ibn Wahb, from ʿAbdullah ibn Masʿud, who said: The Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, said...” He then cited it, and said: “Authentic.”

I cannot say with certainty who made the statement, “Authentic”: was it al-Bazzar, or al-Haythami, the author of al-Zawaʾid? The latter is perhaps more likely, for he said in Majmaʿ al-Zawaʾid (8/66): “Al-Bazzar narrated it, and its narrators are those of the authentic collections.”

However, it appears there as a report attributed to the Companion, with no mention of the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, unlike al-Targhib, where it appears (3/282) as attributed to the Prophet, as in al-Zawaʾid. He said: “Its narrators are the narrators of the authentic collections.”

It is as both of them said: all its narrators are trustworthy and among the narrators of the two Sahihs, apart from the shaykh of ʿAbd al-Samad ibn ʿAbd al-Warith. I could not identify him, since I was unable to determine from the poor manuscript whether he was Shabib, with a bāʾ after the shīn, or Shuʿayb, with an undotted ʿayn. In either case, I could not ascertain who he was. Yet it is possible that it has been corrupted from “Shuʿbah”—that is, Shuʿbah ibn al-Hajjaj, the well-known trustworthy narrator—for he was among the shaykhs of ʿAbd al-Samad and narrated from al-Aʿmash. If that is so, then the chain above al-Bazzar is authentic.

Yet I have some reservation about al-Bazzar’s being alone in attributing it to the Prophet, for, despite his strong memory, he has nevertheless drawn criticism