and in Muʿjam al-Buldān, under the entry “Hawʾab,” it says that the woman addressed was Salmā bint Mālik al-Fazāriyyah. She was a captive given to ʿĀʾishah, and she was the one intended by the Prophet’s alleged address. She apostatized along with Ṭalḥah and was killed in the Wars of Apostasy. It is astonishing that some people attribute this story to Lady ʿĀʾishah in order to satisfy certain partisan passions.”

There are several objections to these words:

First: our esteemed friend assumes that the omission of a hadith by the compilers of the Ṣaḥīḥ collections must be due to a hidden defect in it. This is a manifest error to anyone who has read anything of the science of hadith terminology and the biographies of the compilers of the Ṣaḥīḥ collections. They did not set out to gather in their Ṣaḥīḥ works everything that they regarded as authentic. Imam Muslim explicitly stated this in his Ṣaḥīḥ, in the Book of Prayer. How many hadiths are there whose authenticity or soundness Imam al-Bukhārī explicitly affirms, as al-Tirmidhī reports from him in his Sunan, yet which al-Bukhārī did not include in his Ṣaḥīḥ.

Second: this is if he means by the Ṣaḥīḥ collections the six books. But this designation is incorrect, for the four Sunan among the six books are not Ṣaḥīḥ collections, either technically or in fact. They contain many weak hadiths, and al-Tirmidhī points out their weakness in most cases.

But if he means something broader than that, this too is incorrect. As you have seen from our preceding documentation, Ibn Ḥibbān included it in his Ṣaḥīḥ, and al-Ḥākim in al-Mustadrak ʿalā al-Ṣaḥīḥayn.

Third: his reliance on what appears in Muʿjam al-Buldān, without a chain of transmission, although its author was not a scholar of hadith; and his failure to rely on the Musnad of Imam Aḥmad, which relates the hadith through an authentic chain of transmission, or on its authentication by the critical authority al-Dhahabī!

Fourth: his categorical assertion that the woman addressed was Salmā bint Mālik—without any proof or evidence apart from blind trust in the author of the Muʿjam, whose standing in this field we have already indicated,