the hadith concerning the pledge of allegiance to the Prophet on the day of al-Hudaybiyyah, no. 4187. Al-Hafiz supplied its connected chain (7/456) and noted that some copies read, “He said to me.” On that basis, it is a connected report, and perhaps it was for this reason that al-Hafiz declared it authentic.

Regrettably, your misleading of the readers did not end with what has preceded. You went on to cite the hadiths you mentioned and claimed that al-Bukhari did not use them as evidence, saying:

“Among his four hadiths, there is not a single one which al-Bukhari used as evidence in his Sahih. Rather, he cited them as corroborative reports, as suspended reports, and among the supporting narrations. Those familiar with Sahih al-Bukhari know that material of this kind does not meet his standards.”

I say—and Allah is the One whose help is sought—had he stopped at his words, “and among the supporting narrations,” we would have said: this is his opinion, although it is false, as has already been shown. But to continue his statement by attributing this to those familiar with Sahih al-Bukhari is still more false, and is a deception of the readers which most of them would find difficult to detect without referring to what I have just quoted from the hadith masters—especially al-Hafiz Ibn Hajar, who was not merely one of those familiar with Sahih al-Bukhari, but the most knowledgeable of them concerning it. You have seen his explicit statement to the contrary of what this man has attributed to him. What can I say? May Allah deal with him as he deserves.

Thirdly, after he had filled a column and a half of the newspaper—and you now know what it contained—he came with yet another outrage, adding insult to injury. He cited, from al-Bayhaqi’s narration and from Ibn Hajar in al-Taghliq, Bishr ibn Bakr’s corroborating narration for Hisham ibn Ammar, yet did not attribute it to Ibn Asakir—who, as is well known, preceded Ibn Hajar by centuries—in an act of concealment and misrepresentation, one of the deceptions that prompted me to mention some examples of them. Thus, after the aforementioned corroborating narration, he said:

“And this is even if we concede that it is a strong corroboration for Hisham’s hadith; it contains no explicit mention of musical instruments, because it was narrated by al-Bayhaqi and Ibn Hajar as part of the narration of Hisham ibn Ammar”