“If you feel no shame, then do whatever you wish.”

As for the declarations of al-Hafiz al-Dhahabi and al-Asqalani that he was trustworthy, he concealed them from his readers, because he has no answer except to say of them: “They were merely imitators!” And Allah is the One whose help is sought.

The man was not content with declaring the two preceding hadiths weak; he added to them a third authentic hadith that stood in the way of his whim: the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, said:

“... Whoever breaks a row, Allah will cut him off.”

Its chain of transmission is authentic, as I mentioned there. It was authenticated by a number of scholars, including Ibn Khuzaymah, al-Hakim, al-Mundhiri, al-Nawawi, al-Dhahabi, and al-Asqalani. Yet that ailing man sought to impugn it on the grounds that al-Layth ibn Sa'd transmitted it as a mursal report, and that he did not mention this phrase about cutting off at the end of the hadith—even though Ibn Wahb transmitted it with a connected chain from Ibn Umar, including this addition. An addition made by one trustworthy narrator to the report of another trustworthy narrator is unanimously accepted; none has differed over this except this contrarian! He then tried to attack its chain of transmission and declare it weak, both in its connected and mursal forms, on account of Mu'awiyah ibn Salih. He said: “There is disagreement concerning him, and what appears from the statements of the leading scholars is that he was middling, or below middling...”

So let the readers consider how he cannot settle on a ruling—“middling, or below middling”—in order thereby to declare the hadith weak from its very basis, even though Muslim cited Mu'awiyah as evidence. The final judgment of all the later hadith masters—who were more knowledgeable of the disagreement he mentioned—was that he was reliable; consequently, they successively authenticated his hadith. Al-Hafiz al-Dhahabi said in his biographical notice on him in al-Siyar (7/158):

“The imam, the hadith master, the trustworthy narrator, the judge of al-Andalus ... He was a repository of knowledge.”

Like an ibex that one day butted a rock to weaken it:
It did it no harm, but weakened the ibex’s horn.

In sum, from following his unjust declarations of weakness regarding authentic hadiths established by the hadith masters of the Ummah, I have become certain that the man is infatuated with contrarianism and contentiousness, and with disregarding their principles and judgments, while clinging to the flimsiest defects—even if they are like threads of moonlight!