“Yahya ibn Maʿīn had deemed him weak with respect to his precision.”

Al-Dhahabī thus indicated that Ibn Maʿīn’s unqualified declaration of his weakness, which I had cited there, was not unqualified after all; rather, it was only with respect to his precision. A narrator like this would therefore be graded good in hadith, and Allah knows best.

11—Hadith 302, after line 13

Bishr ibn Bakr also corroborated al-Walīd ibn Muslim in reporting from al-Awzāʿī, with the same wording as al-Walīd’s. Al-Baghawī related it in Sharḥ al-Sunnah (Explanation of the Sunnah) (13/194/3613).

Note: Among the errors of the commentator on the Musnad of Abū Yaʿlā is his statement (3/470), in his commentary on this hadith:

“Its chain of transmission is authentic. Al-Walīd ibn Muslim explicitly stated direct transmission in al-Baghawī!”

This contains three errors:

First: al-Baghawī did not narrate it from al-Walīd, but rather from Bishr, as you have seen. Perhaps it was a slip of the pen.

Second: his explicit declaration of direct transmission occurs only in Muslim; likewise, it occurs in Ibn Ḥibbān’s Ṣaḥīḥ (8/47/209 and 6441—al-Iḥsān).

Third: his above statement shows anyone versed in this noble discipline that he is unaware that al-Walīd ibn Muslim’s concealment in transmission was of a kind for which his explicit declaration of hearing directly from his own shaykh alone is of no benefit. For he practised tadlīs al-taswiyah—equalizing concealment—by omitting the narrator between his shaykh and his shaykh’s shaykh, as is explained in his biographical entry. Were it not for the fact that he has repeatedly made this statement concerning many reports transmitted by al-Walīd ibn Muslim, I would have regarded it as a scribal lapse, from which no writer is immune. But his repetition of it has shown me that it is a scholarly and intellectual error. Consider, for example, Hadiths 41 and 559 in the first and second volumes of