“like one who wears two garments of falsehood!”

The other was that, had he quoted it from me, he would have been obliged to quote it as it stood in my text. For I had explicitly stated there: “with a good chain of transmission,” as you have seen. Yet he deliberately concealed this from his readers, because he did not want to impress upon their minds and hearts that it was a good mursal report. That would conflict with the line he had set for himself: namely, to declare the hadith weak.

Here I must pause to consider this mursal report and what he did in attempting to disqualify it as corroborative evidence by alleging inconsistency in its chain of transmission. For he knows—or perhaps he does know—that when a mursal report is also transmitted through another route with a continuous chain to the Prophet, even if weak, it gains strength through the two taken together, according to Imam al-Shāfiʿī, Ibn Taymiyyah, and others (1). So, lest it be objected that this mursal report is strengthened by the continuous-chain report through Zāfir ibn Sulaymān, he adopted an escape route: gathering from here and there several suspended reports. Some of them mention Rabīʿ ibn Ḥirāsh in place of Mujāhid—and that is the preserved version—while others state: Rabīʿ ibn Ḥirāsh from al-Rabīʿ ibn Khuthaym, though in more than one place he wrote the latter’s name as “Khaytham”! This chain went no further back than Ibrāhīm, along with other reports that have neither coherence nor relevance. He then concluded by saying (p. 50):

“Through these routes, it becomes clear that this mursal report contains manifest inconsistency, and this impugns the soundness of this route!”

Thus he spoke—may Allah guide him. This alone is sufficient to show that the man is not qualified to conduct research in this field, let alone undertake a rebuttal of someone whom he cannot approach in it. For, in the terminology of the scholars, a discrepant hadith is one that has been transmitted in differing forms