It was also transmitted by al-Baghawī in Sharḥ al-Sunnah (4/459/1195) and in his Tafsīr (1/310).
It is also found in Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim (2/199): Abū Bakr ibn Abī Shaybah narrated it to us through the same chain, but without the words, “By Him in Whose Hand is my soul ...,” and so forth. Al-Ḥākim listed it among what Muslim had omitted (3/304), but he was mistaken.
Abū Dāwūd (1460) also transmitted it through another route from ʿAbd al-Aʿlā. Ismāʿīl ibn Ibrāhīm likewise corroborated him, narrating it from Saʿīd ibn Iyās al-Jurayrī through the same chain. Abū ʿUbayd transmitted it in Faḍāʾil al-Qurʾān (122/13–34).
Two observations:
- The wording “a tongue” in the hadith is established in every source that transmits it, except in ʿAbd al-Razzāq’s Muṣannaf, where it appears as “indeed, a tongue,” with an additional emphatic lām. Among the confusions of Shaykh al-Aʿẓamī in his annotations on it is his statement: “Thus it appears in Musnad Aḥmad (!) whereas the Ṣād and Zāy copies have: ‘two tongues’!”
Yet what appears in the Musnad is simply “a tongue,” without the lām, just as in the other sources mentioned above.
- Al-Mundhirī attributed the hadith to Ibn Abī Shaybah without specifying which of his books it was in. The three annotators then took it upon themselves to specify it (2/351) as the Muṣannaf! This is mere conjecture and a shot in the dark. Evidence for this is that, when they traced the hadith through the narrations of Muslim and Abū Dāwūd, they appended reference numbers to them; unlike their attribution to the Muṣannaf, for which they gave no number.
Perhaps, owing to their ignorance, they did not know that Ibn Abī Shaybah had other books as well, such as the Musnad and the Tafsīr, among others; this was the reason for their aforementioned specification!! *