However, the mention of this Layth was omitted from the chain of transmission, so I restored it from al-Ṭabarānī’s aforementioned comment on the hadith. That is why I placed it in square brackets, thereby indicating its omission from the chain. It may have been an early omission that led al-Ḥāfiẓ al-Mundhirī to say in his documentation of the hadith (3/201):

“Al-Ṭabarānī narrated it in al-Awsaṭ, and its narrators are trustworthy.”

Al-Haythamī followed him, saying (4/299):

“Al-Ṭabarānī narrated it, and its narrators are trustworthy!”

His unqualified attribution to al-Ṭabarānī gives the impression that it appears in al-Muʿjam al-Kabīr, but I did not find it there.

This Layth is weak because of the confusion in his later narrations.

Moreover, al-Ṭabarānī’s teacher, Muwarriʿ ibn ʿAbd Allāh—Abū Duhl al-Maṣīṣī—I could not find any biographical entry for him. It appears that he was not among al-Ṭabarānī’s well-known teachers, for al-Ṭabarānī narrated only seven hadiths from him in al-Awsaṭ, this being one of them; he narrated nothing from him in al-Ṣaghīr, nor in his book al-Duʿāʾ.

Further supporting the objectionable nature of the hadith, and that it is among Layth’s reports and his confused narrations, is the fact that ʿAbd al-Razzāq narrated it in al-Muṣannaf (11/443/20958)—from Maʿmar—and Ibn Abī Shaybah (4/252)—from Ḥafṣ—both from Layth, from Mujāhid, from Abū Hurayrah, who said:

“Whoever does that has committed disbelief.”

Al-Nasāʾī also transmitted it in al-Kubrā (5/323/9018), through the route of Sufyān, from Layth, with the wording:

“Anal intercourse with women and men is disbelief.”