Rhetoricians maintain that the item being compared (the mushabbah) is necessarily of lower rank than the exemplar to which it is compared (the mushabbah bih), for the very purpose of the simile is to attach the inferior to the superior in respect of a given attribute. If that is so with prophets, how, then, can one ask Allah to send blessings upon Muḥammad and his family in the same manner that He blessed Abraham and his family?

The scholars have proposed a number of answers to this difficulty.

The soundest reply is that the “family of Abraham,” peace be upon him, comprises every prophet who came after him—including our own Prophet ﷺ; may Allah’s blessings be upon them all.

Thus the supplicant is asking that blessings be bestowed upon the Prophet and his family comparable to the blessings granted to all the prophets from the time of Abraham onward, peace be upon them. It is self-evident that such a collective blessing surpasses a blessing restricted to the Prophet ﷺ alone. Allah knows best.

Second Benefit
Shaykh al-Islam Ibn Taymiyyah said in Majmūʿ al-Fatāwā 22/456: “In the sound collections I have not found—nor in what has been transmitted to me—the wording ‘Abraham and the family of Abraham.’ What is widespread in most reports and chains is simply ‘Abraham,’ and in some of them ‘the family of Abraham.’ The wording ‘Abraham and the family of Abraham’ occurs only in a ḥadīth narrated by al-Bayhaqī. Up to this moment no supported report with an authentic chain has reached me that reads, ‘…as You sent blessings upon Abraham and as You blessed Abraham and the family of Abraham.’”

Ibn al-Qayyim concurred in his Jilāʾ al-Afhām, stating: “Most of the sound and fair ḥadīths—indeed all of them—explicitly mention the Prophet ﷺ together with his family, whereas what concerns Abraham and his family comes either with ‘the family of Abraham’ alone, omitting Abraham himself, or with Abraham alone, omitting his family. No sound ḥadīth contains the wording ‘Abraham and the family of Abraham.’” End quote.

Notwithstanding the lofty standing of Ibn Taymiyyah and his disciple Ibn al-Qayyim, and their acknowledged reliability in transmission and analysis, we must alert readers that in this specific discussion they erred. The combined mention of “Abraham and the family of Abraham” in both the prayer and the invocation of blessing does in fact occur in the two Ṣaḥīḥs, among them the ḥadīth of Kaʿb ibn ʿUjrah cited by the author of ʿUmdat al-Aḥkām, the very report under consideration here.

After reviewing the principal ḥadīth collections and their commentaries on the formula for invoking blessings upon the Prophet ﷺ, I found that Shaykh Nāṣir al-Dīn al-Albānī had already critiqued the two scholars— Ibn Taymiyyah and his companion—along the same lines I have just expressed.

Third Benefit:
When Shaykh al-Islam Ibn Taymiyyah mentioned the ḥadīths and the various chains concerning the manner of invoking blessings upon