- (“How badly you have repaid her! This is not a vow; a vow is only that which is made in seeking Allah’s pleasure.” He said this concerning Abu Dharr’s wife, who had vowed that, if she escaped the disbelievers on the Messenger’s she-camel, peace and blessings be upon him, she would slaughter it.)
Al-Bayhaqī recorded it in his Sunan (10/75) through the route of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn al-Ḥārith, from ʿAmr ibn Shuʿayb, from his father, from his grandfather:
Abu Dharr’s wife came riding al-Qaṣwāʾ, the Messenger of Allah’s mount, peace and blessings be upon him, until she made it kneel by the mosque. She said:
“O Messenger of Allah! I vowed that, if Allah saved me upon her, I would eat of her liver and hump!”
He said: … and then mentioned it.
I say: This is a good chain of transmission. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn al-Ḥārith is the Medinan al-Makhzūmī, Abū al-Ḥārith. Al-Ḥāfiẓ said:
“Truthful, though prone to errors.”
The chain of ʿAmr ibn Shuʿayb, from his father, from his grandfather is good. Aḥmad, al-Bukhārī, al-Tirmidhī, and others relied upon it as evidence, and the scholars after them followed this practice in their hadith sourcing. No weight should be given to certain young people involved in this discipline who, first, are ignorant of the science of narrator criticism and accreditation and, second, have no confidence in the knowledge of the earlier scholars; they declare a narrator weak on account of some criticism levelled against him, even when that criticism is outweighed.
This account is found in Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim and elsewhere, in a more complete form than it appears here, in the hadith of ʿImrān ibn Ḥuṣayn. It was also narrated in the hadith of al-Nawwās ibn Samʿān by al-Ṭabarānī, with a chain of transmission