it was never hidden from me—from the moment I first composed this blessed book, God willing—that al-Bukhari does in fact transmit the report through Abu Hurayra. I deliberately refrained from citing him, however; it was neither out of ignorance nor, at the very least, out of forgetfulness, as those two critics may have imagined. Had the matter been as some might suspect, the many years and successive printings of this work would surely have been enough for the inattentive to awaken or the unlearned to learn. Yet nothing of the sort was required, praise be to Allah. I already knew that one of the transmitters—Abu Asim al-Dahhak b. Makhlad al-Nabil, a trustworthy narrator—had erred in his version of the hadith from Abu Hurayra. He related it from Ibn Jurayj, from Ibn Shihab, from Abu Salama, from Abu Hurayra as a marfuʿ report, but with the wording “He is not one of us who does not chant the Quran.” Here is the evidence: a group of reliable transmitters also narrated the hadith from Ibn Jurayj with the very same chain and as a marfuʿ report, yet their wording was: “ma adhina Allah li-shayʾ… (Allah has not granted permission to anything…),” and so on. An even larger number of trustworthy narrators corroborated Ibn Jurayj on this wording, all of them reporting it from al-Zuhri. And al-Zuhri, in turn, was supported by Yahya b. Abi Kathir, Muhammad b. ʿAmr, Muhammad b. Ibrahim al-Taymi, and ʿAmr b. Dinar—all reliable—each of whom said: from Abu Salama, from Abu Hurayra. The unanimous agreement of these sound transmitters, all working with the same chain back to Abu Hurayra, that the hadith carries the second wording is the strongest proof that Abu Asim’s solitary transmission with the first wording is a clear error on his part. This is precisely the kind of anomalous (shaadh) hadith described by the specialists. For that reason al-Hafiz Abu Bakr al-Naysaburi stated categorically that Abu Asim was mistaken, “because of the large number who narrated it from Ibn Jurayj with the second wording.” I would add: because of the equally large number who narrated it from al-Zuhri, and those who followed him through Abu Salama, as just noted. Al-Khatib al-Baghdadi therefore endorsed Abu Bakr al-Naysaburi’s judgment, and Ibn al-Athir in his Jamiʿ and later Ibn Hajar in Fath al-Bari (13/429) both offered a subtle hint that this wording is also faulty—so subtle, in fact, that some readers might miss it, or, noticing it, might lack the scholarly boldness to declare a narrator of the Sahih in error. This is the substance of the investigation I placed in the original edition some twenty years ago. I felt obliged to repeat it here so that every fair-minded person can judge whether I am the one who “went far afield,” or whether it was others—who rejected my view with what the hadith experts deem an error—who failed to make the proper journey and wanted me to share and endorse their mistake. Allah alone is the One whose help is sought.