al-Luʾluʾī, the jurist and hadith master? That student claimed that he was not, but was rather al-Madāʾinī, the blind man, and that he was unknown. I then ascertained that he was indeed al-Madāʾinī by locating reports from him in more than one source, and I declared his categorical assertion that he was unknown to be mistaken, since a number of hadith masters narrated from him. It seems that he does not know that scholars rely upon narrators such as him as evidence, as al-Dhahabī established in al-Mīzān, and as al-Lakhnawī quoted from him in al-Rafʿ wa-l-Takmīl. This is why al-Ḍiyāʾ al-Maqdisī included it in al-Mukhtārah, and al-ʿIrāqī and al-Haythamī considered its chain of transmission good, as you will see there.

That student, therefore, ought to have exercised care and investigated the matter, rather than stopping at his personal opinion, for he appears to have no knowledge of this discipline. Otherwise, al-Tirmidhī’s grading of it as good through the first chain would have sufficed him, and he would have regarded the other chain as corroborating it, since it is not severely weak, at the very least.

3. A third example concerns an Egyptian youth who called himself Faysal ʿAbd al-Ḥalīm and stated that he was twenty-two years old. Several years ago, he sent me an undated, unsigned letter in which he praised me profusely, mentioned that he had examined my writings (!) and devoted himself to them, making them his chief pursuit, and said that he wished to study under me. Yet he enclosed with his letter a treatise in which he criticized five hadiths from this volume and audaciously declared them weak, displaying astonishing boldness and profound ignorance. Any sensible person need only consider this in light of his stated age: when did he learn, and when did he acquire sufficient mastery to become a critic of one whose student he hoped to become?

Dear reader, here is one example of his criticism, by which you will confirm what I have described him as and judge the rest of the examples accordingly:

He objected to my strengthening of the following hadith:

619—“Three things are not refused: cushions...” the hadith.

His argument was that its narrator from Ibn ʿUmar, Muslim ibn Jundub, was declared trustworthy by no one but al-ʿIjlī and Ibn Ḥibbān; and he says that they are both lenient! This is enough to make a bereaved woman laugh, for what he says about leniency comes from my books, writings, annotations, and refutations