Ahmad 5820

Its isnad is sahih. The one who says, "I said to him," and so on, is Abdullah bin Ahmad, and we have clarified this by adding [Abdullah bin Ahmad] so that the matter is not confused for the reader, who might otherwise think it refers to one of the teachers in the chain of transmission. The one who answers is Imam Ahmad, may Allah have mercy on him, relating the statement he heard, verified, and confirmed regarding this isnad, namely that Muhammad bin Amr bin Alqama Laythi said, "Abu Salama narrated to me," and so on. The Imam does not mean that Abu Salama narrated to him personally. Rather, he answers in a way that the questioner, the listener, and the reader understand that he is relating the statement of the narrator Muhammad bin Amr in this isnad, and that they know there is no ambiguity in that, so that it would never occur to anyone that Ahmad is narrating from Abu Salama bin Abdul-Rahman bin Awf by direct hearing, since Abu Salama died about seventy years before Ahmad was born.This hadith has occurred several times before, including number 4831 from Muaz bin Muaz, and number 4863 from Yazid bin Harun, both of them from Abu Salama from Ibn Umar as a raised report, and including numbers 5730 and 5731 from Yunus from Hammad bin Zayd from Nafi from Ibn Umar as a raised report. I made an effort to find the stopped narration of Ibn Sirin to which Abdullah bin Ahmad alludes in his question, but I found nothing except what Ahmad related in Kitab al-Ashribah, pages 73–74, "Mutamir narrated to us from his father from Ibn Sirin from Ibn Umar, who said, 'Whatever intoxicates, whether little or much, is forbidden,' or he said, 'wine.'" This is from Ibn Sirin from Ibn Umar, and it is a stopped report, so perhaps this is what Abdullah is alluding to.