Once this is understood, the Imam’s error becomes clear in several respects:

First: he judged Abū al-Aḥwaṣ—a trustworthy narrator—to have erred in his chain of transmission—from Abū Isḥāq, from Mujāhid, from Ibn ʿUmar—on the basis of an unspecified report from Nufayʿ al-Aʿmā, without setting out its chain of transmission for us to examine whether it is sound enough to counter the chain of transmission of such a trustworthy narrator, or whether it is like the chain of that previously mentioned dissenting narrator, ʿAmmār ibn Ruzayq.

Second: even assuming that the chain which he did not cite is authentic down to Nufayʿ, and that it centres on Abū Isḥāq, it still cannot stand against Abū al-Aḥwaṣ’s report, since Sufyān and Isrāʾīl corroborated him.

Third: even if Nufayʿ’s report were assumed to be weightier than the reports of those three, there remain the two other routes from Ibn ʿUmar and the corroborating report from Ibn Masʿūd; all of this invalidates the preference in question.

Fourth: even if we were to grant this preference for the sake of argument, it would not entail declaring the hadith weak, for the reasons I mentioned before addressing the first point. All of them are present in this hadith, as has already been explained—especially with regard to the two rakʿahs before dawn. Al-Ḥāfiẓ mentioned in al-Fatḥ (3/47), regarding this hadith of Ibn ʿUmar, corroborating reports from ʿĀʾishah, Ibn Masʿūd—the one previously cited—Anas, Jābir, and Abū Hurayrah. He attributed them to their respective sources in the books of the sunnah. The most authentic of them is the hadith of Abū Hurayrah, for it is found in Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim and in Abū ʿAwānah; it is also included in Ṣaḥīḥ Abī Dāwūd, no. 1150.

There is another criticism of the hadith, resembling the foregoing in its strangeness and sharing its oversight of the authentic route. Moreover, it criticizes the previously mentioned weak route narrated by Layth ibn Abī Sulaym. Ibn Naṣr said after citing it: