—namely, accusing Ibn Ḥibbān of inconsistency and giving the impression that the narration of ʿUbayd Allāh ibn Muʿādh is from al-Ashʿath ibn Suwār. Layers of darkness, one upon another, and lies piled upon lies.

I do not believe that the annotator in question is Shaykh Shuʿayb himself. Rather, he is one of those who work under him, upon whom he relies without examining their haphazard blunders; then these are published under his name and as his critical edition. He is therefore accountable in this respect, even though he sometimes places another person’s name alongside his own, and thus accountability becomes muddled, as they say in Syria. I have seen many blunders of the kind mentioned above in the annotations to al-Iḥsān and elsewhere. One of them has already been mentioned under hadith 3093. In Ibn Ḥibbān, it appears in an extremely abridged form, with an interrupted chain, as follows:

“Whoever causes a Jew or a Christian to hear shall enter the Fire!”

This is false and has no basis in any of the hadith source works in which it is traced. It is merely an error on the part of one of its transmitters in al-Iḥsān, and its chain is interrupted. Yet its annotator declared the chain sound! To make matters worse, owing to his ignorance of its legal import, he interpreted it in a manner contrary to the Shariah, and contrary as well to Ibn Ḥibbān’s own interpretation—though Ibn Ḥibbān’s interpretation itself warrants scrutiny, as I have explained there. Refer to it if you wish.

Then something occurred to me that confirms what I indicated regarding the difference between the annotators of al-Iḥsān: what led the falsifier to alter the chain of transmission was simply his assumption that Abū Khalīfah’s statement in the chain, “My father narrated to us,” was a scribal error, because he did not know Abū Khalīfah’s father. There is nothing surprising about this ignorance, for his biographical notice is exceedingly scarce. For this reason, Brother al-Dārānī wrote in his annotation to his edition of al-Mawārid (2/43):

“Abū Khalīfah al-Faḍl ibn al-Ḥabbāb is not known, to our knowledge, to have narrated from his father.”

I say: There is no blame upon him for this, for he went only as far as his knowledge reached and did not venture beyond what he knew—