“I heard Qutaybah say: ‘I was informed that Muḥammad ibn Kaʿb al-Quraẓī was born during the lifetime of the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him.’”

I say: Although al-Tirmidhī did not authenticate this report—how could he, when he mentioned it as an unchained report transmitted from an unknown source?—it is anomalous and unacceptable, as al-Judayʿ himself has said. Yet, regarding al-Tirmidhī’s statement, he says:

“Perhaps this statement was his basis for authenticating the hadith, which is why he mentioned it. Abū Dāwūd agreed with al-Tirmidhī in transmitting it from Qutaybah, but in Abū Dāwūd’s version: ‘I heard Qutaybah say: I was informed that he saw the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him.’ Abū Dāwūd relied on this statement and thus said of Muḥammad ibn Kaʿb: ‘He heard from ʿAlī, Muʿāwiyah, and Ibn Masʿūd.’”

I say: As for his statement, “Perhaps …” and so forth, let him place that “perhaps” beside that distant star. Likewise, his statement, “Abū Dāwūd relied on this statement …,” is no better—indeed, it is worse—for it is a mere assertion unsupported by evidence. It should therefore be cast aside, especially since it is intended to rebut an established fact: the explicit statement of a trustworthy narrator that he heard directly. Indeed, it entails accusing two leading hadith authorities of the Ummah of authenticating hadiths on the basis of an interrupted unchained report whose weakness would be apparent even to a beginner in this discipline.

By Allah, I am astonished at this researcher’s audacity in advancing such a destructive claim, one that no one before him has made. Nor is that all: he gives no weight to some of the statements supporting the connectedness of the chain, made by hadith masters among the leading authorities of narrator criticism and accreditation, who were acquainted with the statements of the earlier critical scholars—such as the hadith master al-ʿAsqalānī, who dismissed the aforementioned unchained report from Qutaybah, saying: “It has no basis in fact.”