Then his statement, ‘And nahk means going to extremes in everything,’ is an astonishing contradiction—and a textual corruption! I found the same in the hadith in question in al-Haythami’s Majmaʿ al-Zawaʾid. Perhaps he copied al-Mundhiri, or perhaps it stood thus in the original exemplar used by them both; yet this is unquestionably incorrect. The correct wording is rather, ‘la-tanhakunna,’ or, ‘la-tanhakannahā,’ without the additional tāʾ and with an a vowel on the hāʾ, derived from nahk (thoroughness), which he explained afterward. This is how the lexicographers and authorities on obscure expressions have recorded it, without any disagreement among them. In the section on Jihad and Encouragement to Martyrdom, the compiler repeated his explanation of nahk, but erred in vocalizing the expression ‘inhakū.’ We have discussed this at length there; and Allah is the One Whose help is sought.”

I say: Remarkably, many sources have successively reproduced this textual corruption, in addition to al-Targhib and al-Majmaʿ. It also appears thus in the source of the hadith itself, al-Muʿjam al-Awsat, at the place indicated above—namely, the Dar al-Haramayn edition. It likewise appears in the al-Maʿarif edition (2695), and in the photographic copy I possess (1/1150/2832, according to my numbering), except that it has a yāʾ, the letter with two dots beneath it: ‘la-yantahikunna,’ or ‘la-yantahikannahā.’ The same occurs in the Companion-attributed version in al-Muʿjam al-Kabir.

However, the correct reading appears in Majmaʿ al-Bahrayn (1/340, edited by Abd al-Quddus Nadhir), as well as in a manuscript copy of al-Targhib to which the three annotators referred in the footnote, designating it by the letter B. Yet, out of ignorance, they did not adopt its reading, but instead established the corrupted wording, merely following what appears in Majmaʿ al-Zawaʾid!

Note: Some forty years ago—before I obtained Ibn Abi Hatim’s al-Jarh wa al-Taʿdil—I had concluded that the hadith under discussion was weak, relying on what is stated in Tahdhib al-Hafiz and al-Taqrib, to which reference has already been made. For that reason, I did not include it in the previous editions of my book Sahih al-Targhib wa al-Tarhib. Now, as we are reviewing some of the fascicles of its counterpart, Daʿif al-Targhib, and undertaking a careful investigation into