There I reminded him of this grave departure from the scholars’ position—one which I do not think any Muslim who acknowledges the knowledge and merit of these imams would dare to make. In addition, I demonstrated the flimsiness of the arguments to which he had clung in weakening the hadith. But when he became aware of this, he stubbornly persisted, acted arrogantly—as is his habit—and dug in his heels. He then wrote a lengthy response spanning five pages, containing nothing of scholarship apart from his personal opinions, which are “like a mirage in a desert, which the thirsty man takes for water.” He is truly a consummate evader: whenever he is confronted with irrefutable evidence, he evades it by means of an interpretation of his own devising.

Take, for example, Atiyyah ibn Qays, the Successor and imam—as al-Dhahabi described him. When we refuted his claim that he was “unknown in status” by pointing out that Muslim declared him reliable and relied upon him in his Sahih, as did al-Hafiz in declaring him reliable, he pedantically replied: “Muslim did not declare him reliable; he merely cited him in corroborative reports.” He then referred to the hadith he meant, which appears in Muslim as no. 477.

This is something no one before him had ever said, and it runs contrary to the position of the hadith masters who wrote biographical notices on the man, such as al-Mizzi, al-Dhahabi, al-Asqalani, and others. They unreservedly attributed him to Muslim, without saying, “in corroborative reports.” Yet when they attributed him to al-Bukhari, they qualified this by indicating with the symbol, “in a suspended report.” This reflects their precision—may Allah have mercy on them—which the aforementioned man either overlooks or deliberately ignores, because he has no confidence in their knowledge. Indeed, al-Mizzi explicitly stated at the end of his biographical notice:

“Al-Bukhari cited one hadith of his as a corroboration—that is, in a suspended report, namely this one—while the remaining compilers narrated from him.”

What further confirms this is that the hadith to which he referred occurs in Muslim between two hadiths concerning what the worshipper says when he raises his head from bowing. All three are authentic hadiths, and none of them contains any narrator whom Muslim did not rely upon as proof.

His claim is no different from that of someone whom an opponent were to challenge by saying, concerning the third narrator of the hadith—