Second: Some time later, I appended the following comment to it:

“Then I found him in al-Jarḥ wa-al-Taʿdīl, 4/2/129, reported from him by three trustworthy narrators. Perhaps he is mentioned in Ibn Ḥibbān’s al-Thiqāt, and some hadiths in this chapter corroborate it.”

Third: After my migration to Amman in 1400 AH and my settlement there, I acquired a copy of Ibn Ḥibbān’s al-Thiqāt printed in India, about ten years ago. I then arranged it alphabetically before acquiring its printed indexes, entitled al-Jāmiʿ ... Over time, my index came to include a new layer of annotation and critical verification unlike anything found in the editor of al-Thiqāt, let alone the author of al-Jāmiʿ. This included, for example, confirming the reliability of certain narrators, criticizing them, declaring them unknown, and other benefits, such as referring to some of their hadiths.

As I was recently occupied with proofreading the new edition of my book Ḍaʿīf al-Targhīb and revising its original work, al-Taʿlīq al-Raghīb, I found therein the hadith under discussion, based on the earlier annotation mentioned under “First.” I therefore returned to my book Tartīb al-Thiqāt (1), where I found that I had annotated it with much the same information just mentioned: that five trustworthy narrators reported from its narrator, Yaḥyā ibn Abī Usayd, and that al-Ḥākim and al-Dhahabī declared the hadith authentic. I concluded the annotation by saying:

“... Thus, he is truthful.”

It therefore became most likely to me that the hadith was strong, since Yaḥyā’s unknown status had been removed. Yet, in the interest of complete verification and caution regarding the hadith of the Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him—and so as not to attribute to him anything whose authenticity we have not ascertained—I raised a question to myself: perhaps among the narrators preceding him there is one who weakens