As for the contrived innovations introduced by those who dabble in prosody and music—treating the speech of Allah the way they treat poetry of longing and love—this is one of the gravest bidʿa (religious innovations). The listener is obliged to object, and the reciter deserves disciplinary punishment. Some Sufis inferred from this a recommendation to listen to a beautiful voice, but that has been refuted as a faulty analogy, likening what Allah has commanded to what He has forbidden—how could the two ever be comparable? End of quotation. (1) This hadith is narrated from Fadala b. ʿUbayd. Al-Hakim (1/571) and Ahmad (6/19) report it through the chain: al-Walid b. Muslim—Abu ʿAmr al-Awzaʿi—Ismail b. ʿUbayd Allah b. Abi al-Muhajir—from Fadala. Al-Hakim judged it “sound according to the criteria of the two Shaykhs,” but al-Dhahabi replied, “Rather, it is munqatiʿ (broken).” I say: Ibn Majah (1/403), Ibn Nasr (54), and Ahmad as well (6/20) supplied a connected chain: al-Walid—al-Awzaʿi—Ismail b. ʿUbayd Allah—Maysara, the freedman of Fadala—from Fadala; the extra wording is found only in Ibn Majah. Al-Bukhari also cites it decisively in Afʿal al-ʿIbad (79): “Maysara, the freedman of Fadala, narrated from Fadala ….” Yet, as al-Mizan notes, no one other than Ismail transmits from this Maysara, and no scholar has declared him trustworthy. (*) In the author’s autograph the Shaykh had crossed out this hadith but left its documentation, indicating at the end that it is weak. We have retained it here with its references in this form and without deleting the text, merely printing it in regular type rather than boldface.