and this is an authentic hadith. All of its transmitters are reliable and appear in the six canonical collections, and every chain that reaches ʿAsim is sound. The fact that the Companion is unnamed does not harm the report, for all Companions are upright—­as we have mentioned repeatedly. Ibn Abi Shaybah also recorded it (1/100/1 = 1/324, no. 3710) with the third wording, and ʿAbd al-Haqq passed it over in silence, thereby affirming its soundness. Ibn al-Qattan said: “It is exactly as he stated, and the claim that it is weak is baseless.” I have found no one who commented on the hadith and clarified its intent except al-Manawi in Fayd al-Qadir, yet he was mistaken when he wrote: “That is, it is not disliked to recite the Quran while bowing and prostrating.” Elsewhere he proposed: “It may also mean that, after finishing a surah, you should perform a prayer before beginning the next one; or that you should give the recitation its due share of humility and submissiveness—equivalent to bowing and prostration in prayer—and, when you pass by a verse of prostration, prostrate.” Both of these interpretations are very remote from the actual wording of the hadith, especially the second; and, to my knowledge, no scholar has ever acted upon the second understanding. The first interpretation is the one closest to the plain sense of the report, yet even that was not how the early transmitters understood it, as shown in the discussion of its chains. Abu al-ʿAliyah—one of the narrators—used to combine twenty surahs in a single rakʿah until this hadith reached him; once he heard it, he abandoned that practice. Similarly, when the report reached Ibn Sirin, he found it odd and objected that Ibn ʿUmar would combine surahs, so he sought to verify the narration. Thus Abu al-ʿAliyah and Ibn Sirin agreed that the hadith means one should limit each rakʿah to a single surah. The version whose wording most clearly conveys this sense is the second wording: