Even if there were nothing but his method of declaring these three hadiths weak, it would suffice as evidence of what I have stated. So what then when there are dozens—if not hundreds—in which he has wielded the pickaxe of demolition, following the way of the people of deviant desires, both ancient and modern, including the Ibadis, whom al-Saqqaf extols and upon whose Musnad al-Rabi he relies?!

I have seen a treatise by one of their contemporaries, entitled A Treatise on Raising and Folding the Hands in Prayer, in which he declared weak the hadiths on raising the hands in prayer—though they are mass-transmitted in meaning—and the hadiths on placing the right hand over the left while standing, which are well known in the two Sahih collections, the Sunan collections, and elsewhere. He employed precisely the same method as that contrarian. I shall confine myself to only two examples:

He declared weak Ibn Umar’s hadith, reported by al-Bukhari and Muslim, concerning the raising of the hands, on the grounds that it was transmitted by Ibn Shihab al-Zuhri. He said (p. 18):

“Al-Hafiz al-Dhahabi said of him in al-Mizan: ‘He practised concealment in transmission!’”

Yet although al-Zuhri explicitly stated direct transmission in some narrations, the Ibadi concealed this from the readers—as others like him among the people of deviant desires do—omitting the rest of al-Dhahabi’s statement: “only rarely.” This is not criticism that impugns a narrator’s reliability, as is well known in the science of hadith terminology.

He then declared weak the hadith of Wa'il ibn Hujr concerning the placement of the hands, reported by Muslim and others, saying (p. 28) that it was transmitted by Alqamah ibn Wa'il from his father. Ibn Hajar, he claimed, said in al-Tahdhib: “Alqamah did not hear from his father!”

I say: Not only is this not Ibn Hajar’s own statement concerning him; rather, he was merely relating that someone had attributed this statement to Ibn Ma'in, and that attribution is disconnected. Moreover, Alqamah explicitly stated direct transmission from his father in al-Nasa'i’s narration, as I explained in al-Sahihah under hadith 3176.