Ahmad 5524

Its isnad is sahih. It has already appeared in abbreviated form with this same isnad at 5269, and its meaning has already appeared with other isnads at 5504. We have already discussed at 5269 his words "at the onset of their purity" and referred to this hadith there. We then listed the numbers of the hadiths reported from Ibn Umar concerning this divorce, at 5270.In the wording of this narration there occurs a transposition of terms, whose explanation requires a good deal of forced interpretation. It seems to me that this transposition occurred in the old copies of the Musnad that have not reached us, since it is fixed in the three copies I possess, and in another manuscript of it kept at Dar al-Kutub al-Misriyyah. I think that the early scholars among the narrators and copyists of the Musnad left it as it occurred at this point, preserving the wording that had come down to them, and trusting that the knowledgeable reader would grasp the correct arrangement intuitively.So it appears that the correct wording should be, "The Prophet said, 'Let him take her back.' So he returned her to me, and he did not regard it as anything, and said, 'When she becomes pure, let him either divorce her or keep her.'" A copyist or narrator erred by delaying the phrase "so he returned her" and placing it after the word "and said," so that when it is restored to its proper place, the wording becomes correct without any forcing. We illustrate this with the following arrangement, "Let him take her back [so he returned her] to me, and he did not regard her as anything, and said [so he returned her], 'When she becomes pure, let him either divorce her or keep her.'"The phrase "so he returned her," which we have marked for removal with two lines above and below it, if deleted and placed in its proper location, as we have shown here in brackets, makes the wording correct. I have chosen to record the text as it has come down, with whatever transposition it contains, and to explain how the error occurred and what its correction is. This is the practice of the early scholars of hadith, that when they found an error or a deficiency, they recorded it as it stood, along with tadbeeb and tamreed.Ibn Salah said in Uloom al-Hadith, 179, "As for tadbeeb, also called tamreed, it is placed over wording that is confirmed to have been transmitted exactly so, but which is corrupt in expression or in meaning, or weak, or deficient... A line is drawn over whatever fits this description, its beginning shaped like the letter sad, and it must not be joined directly to the word it marks, lest it be mistaken for a strikethrough, as though it were the sad of tashih placed right after it with no gap between them. It is written in this way to distinguish between what is confirmed absolutely, both in transmission and otherwise, and what is confirmed only in transmission but not otherwise, so that the mark of tashih is left incomplete over it, and an incomplete letter is written over an incomplete letter, signaling its deficiency and its defect, despite the soundness of its transmission and narration, alerting anyone examining his book that he came across it and transmitted it just as it stood, and that perhaps someone else might find a sound explanation for it, or its soundness might later become clear to him in a way not yet apparent now. Had he instead altered it and corrected it according to his own judgment, he would have exposed himself to what befell more than one of the presumptuous ones who made such alterations, only for the truth to turn out to lie in what they had rejected, and the corruption to lie in what they had 'corrected.'"