I say—so much so that some malicious, ignorant youngsters have seized upon this as a pretext to attribute to me what is befitting only of themselves and others like them among the deviants who have gone astray.

It was because of this difference between them and the virtuous shaykh that I was keen to respond to him and explain my position regarding his view. Perhaps he became convinced of the correctness of what I wrote, since he sent me no further rejoinder thereafter.

His remarks may be summarized in two points:

First: his declaring the narrator Yahya ibn Ayyub al-Ghafiqi weak, and his claim that the hadith authorities were agreed upon declaring his hadiths weak.

Second: his unqualified declaration that Ibn Lahi‘ah was weak, as well as his declaring al-Harith ibn Abi Usamah weak.

There, I explained his error in this satisfactorily, relying on the statements of the critical hadith authorities. In summary, the matter is as follows:

First: he gave precedence to narrator criticism over accreditation without qualification. The correct view is that criticism is given precedence when its reason is specified and when it is, in itself, consequential criticism. That is not the case here.

As for al-Ghafiqi, he was trustworthy in himself, although his retention contained a slight weakness that does not lower his hadith beneath the level at which it may be used as evidence. This is how the hadith authorities who transmitted his hadiths treated him: Muslim relied upon him, and the authorities before my time—such as al-Tirmidhi, Ibn Hibban, al-Hakim, al-Mundhiri, and al-Dhahabi—authenticated this hadith of his. This is entailed by al-Hafiz’s assessment of him:

“Truthful; he may occasionally err.”