“He is one who lives in the desert, whose dwelling is among tented encampments; he is not settled in one place, unlike one who resides permanently in the cities.”

Secondly, his statement: “Nor is there any distinction in this respect between the desert and settled areas!”

I say: This is sophistry and brazen obstinacy of the most extreme kind, in two respects:

First, his setting aside the authentic hadiths in favour of an anomalous hadith, even though they explicitly establish the distinction that he denied.

Second, his denial of the well-known fact that desert people do not settle or remain in one place; rather, they move from one location to another in search of water and pasture for their livestock. Indeed, some scholars did not hold the Friday prayer to be obligatory for them, because they are not settled.

From what has preceded, it becomes clear to everyone possessed of insight how untenable is his denial, at the end of his remarks, of these established facts, when he says: “Thus, the hadith as found in al-Bukhari indicates a request to be buried beside righteous people ...”!!

In sum, the hadith in al-Bukhari’s al-Adab al-Mufrad is anomalous and does not deserve to be graded fair, let alone authentic. The sound version is rather the one with the differing wording: “the desert.”

3944—“I shall precede you to the Basin. So beware lest any of you come and be driven away from me as a stray camel is driven away. I shall say, ‘Why is this?’ It will be said, ‘You do not know what they introduced after you!’ So I shall say, ‘Away with them!’”

Muslim recorded it (7/67), as did al-Nasa’i in al-Tafsīr al-Kubrā (13/16/18173—Tuḥfat al-Ashrāf), Ahmad (6/297), and al-Ṭabarānī in al-Muʿjam al-Kabīr (23/297 and 413), on the authority of ʿAbd Allāh ibn Rāfiʿ, the freedman of Umm Salamah, the Prophet’s wife, who said: