I say: This too is an authentic chain of transmission; all its narrators are trustworthy. It provides strong evidence that what is meant by the prohibition is only hurrying one’s pace, for the narrator of a hadith knows what he narrated better than anyone else—especially when he himself is the one addressed by the prohibition. Take note of this, for it is a valuable point that you may not find in the extensive works on hadith and hadith source documentation. And with Allah lies success.
- At the end of Hadith (266):
Note: Among the remarkable instances of people following one another in error, departing from sound scholarly criticism, and hadith authorities successively strengthening this hadith, is what occurred among the hadith source-tracers who came after al-Mubārakfūrī. They are a number of people:
First: al-Mubārakfūrī, whose reason for error has already been explained in detail.
Second: Shaykh Aḥmad Shākir—may Allah have mercy on him—in his annotation on al-Musnad (2/332). It seems most likely to me that the reason for his error, despite the occurrence of the designation “al-Qurashī” in al-Musnad, was that this hadith appeared between two hadiths narrated by ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Isḥāq, from al-Nuʿmān ibn Saʿd, from ʿAlī. In both of them, he is certainly al-Wāsiṭī; thus, his eye—or his mistaken impression—shifted to him, and he did not notice the designation “al-Qurashī” in our hadith.
Such a slip is not blameworthy, for no scribe or author is immune from it. Rather, blame rests with those who came after him, blindly imitated him, ignored the aforementioned designation, or accused the narrator who reported it of error without proof or evidence. They are:
Third: Shaykh Shuʿayb al-Arnaʾūṭ, along with the other six who collaborated with him in the critical edition (!) in the annotation on al-Musnad as well (2/438, Muʾassasah edition). He—or all of them—dared to declare the narrators mistaken on the basis of mere assertion, saying:
“The statement of one of the narrators in this hadith identifying ʿAbd al-Raḥmān as ‘al-Qurashī’