First: One may say to you, “Set up the throne before you carve the inscription,” meaning: secure your premise first, for this athar (report) is not authentically traced back to Ibn Masud—at best it is only related about him, as will be shown. Your remark, “with a sahih isnad (sound chain of transmission) from al-Shaʿbi,” is a crafty instance of tadlis (misleading concealment) directed at lay readers who do not notice the equivocation. Why did you not say, “with a sound isnad from Ibn Masud”? You refrained—Allah knows—because al-Shaʿbi, whose full name is Amir ibn Sharahil, never heard Ibn Masud, as stated by Ibn Abi Hatim, al-Daraqutni, al-Hakim, al-Mizzi, al-ʿAlaʾi, Ibn Hajar and others. This is precisely why al-Haythami, in Majmaʿ al-Zawaʾid (2/143), after citing the report from al-Tabarani (al-Muʿjam al-Kabir 9/276, no. 9184), limited himself to the comment, “its narrators are those of the Sahih.” He did not declare it sahih, and—as I have noted elsewhere—such wording is not a full authentication. Therefore you resorted to tadlis and avoided saying “with a sound isnad from Ibn Masud”; had you done so you would have laid yourself bare. Second: Suppose, for argument’s sake, that the report really is authentic from Ibn Masud. That might aid you—if it stood alone—in defending the third-person salutation as his personal ijtihad (independent reasoning). But what of the rest of the Companions who agreed with him, among them Lady Aishah? Did they all exercise ijtihad and dare to alter the text, while you alone discovered and kept to the original? Yet you yourself tamper with many texts, such as your insertion of the word sayyid (master) into the Ibrahimic blessing of the prayer. Plainly, what drives such contradiction is nothing but caprice; Allah is the one whose help is sought. Third: Even if we concede that they all exercised ijtihad, are we to believe they all erred, while you and those like you alone were correct? Fourth: Your statement, “this jumlah (sentence) was added …,” is pure error, for a jumlah—according to rhetoricians and grammarians—is speech containing both a predicate and a subject, and here there is nothing of that sort except the two words “min rabbina” (“from our Lord”). Is this what passes for a sentence with the “scholar” al-Ghumari, who has nominated—indeed imposed—himself as the renewer of this century in some of his recent tracts? Or is it yet another act of tadlis, making readers imagine that Ibn Masud inserted a complete sentence into the tashahhud? Far be it from him to add even a single letter to what he learned from the Prophet ﷺ, especially when he reproved his own students for innovations in that very formula, as noted earlier.