This, then, is the clamour raised by that partisan against the sound sunnah: he turned Imam Ahmad’s freedom to place the hands in more than one spot into “proof” that placing them on the chest is not established at all! Had he truly loved the sunnah and been protective of it—as protective as he is of his own school, lest anything unsound be ascribed to it—and had he been fair in his criticism, he would have challenged my view by analysing the very hadiths I cited to prove this practice. I pointed out their sources, but he knows that if he did so his bias would be exposed and his hostility to the sunnah unmasked. How could it be otherwise, when he actually declared one of those very hadiths sound, but in a passage far removed from the place where he had first cast doubt on it, thereby obscuring the matter and misleading the readers? Thus he quoted (3/10)—from the chains of al-Tirmidhi and Ahmad—the hadith of Qabisah ibn Hulb, from his father, who said: “The Messenger of Allah would take his left hand with his right.” He then commented: “Al-Tirmidhi said: It is a hasan (good) hadith, and he is right. Ahmad, in another version, adds: ‘He would place this on his chest.’” (This report has already been cited above, p. 216.) There are other traditions as well, including two that he himself mentioned. The first is the mursal report of Tawus: “The Messenger of Allah would place his right hand on his left hand and tighten them upon his chest while praying.” He criticised it on account of Sulayman ibn Musa al-Dimashqi, saying (3/9): “He is somewhat weak, became confused shortly before his death, and the report is mursal.” I reply: a mursal report is accepted evidence among the Hanafis, and among others too when it is also transmitted with a continuous chain or through additional routes, as is the case here. His phrase “somewhat weak …” is taken from Ibn Hajar’s Taqrib, yet he omitted what praises Sulayman and shows he is better than that description suggests. Ibn Hajar’s exact words are: “Trustworthy, a jurist; in his hadith there is some mild weakness, and he became confused shortly before his death.” A transmitter of this calibre yields a hasan (fair) hadith at worst, and sahih (sound) when corroborated by parallel chains. Ibn ʿAdi said about him—after relating the verdicts of the leading critics and citing several of his unique narrations—