The Messenger of Allah ﷺ came out to us carrying his staff. In the mosque there were clusters of dates hanging up, among them a cluster containing inferior, dried-up dates. He poked that cluster with the staff in his hand and said, "If the owner of this charity had wished, he could have given something better than this in charity. The owner of this charity will eat these poor dates on the Day of Resurrection."Then he turned to us and said, "By Allah, people of Madinah, you will leave it for forty years to the awafi."I said, "Allah knows best."He explained that he meant the birds and beasts of prey.We used to say that this referred to what the non-Arabs call kurakim, meaning cranes.
خرج علينا رسول الله ﷺ ومعه العصا، وفي المسجد أقناء معلقة، فيها قنو فيه حشف، فغمز القنو بالعصا التي في يده قال: لو شاء رب هذه الصدقة، تصدق بأطيب منها، إن رب هذه الصدقة ليأكل الحشف يوم القيامة، قال: ثم أقبل علينا، فقال: أما والله يا أهل المدينة، لتدعنها أربعين عاما للعوافي، قال: فقلت: الله أعلم، قال: يعني الطير والسباع، قال: وكنا نقول: إن هذا للذي تسميه العجم، هي الكراكي.
Ahmad (23976) narrated it, and the wording here follows his version. Ibn Hibban (6774) graded it sahih, as did Hakim (2/825 and 4/425–426), all of them through the route of Abdul-Hameed bin Jafar, who said, "Salih bin Abu Urayb narrated to me, from Kathir bin Mura, from Awf bin Malik," and he related it in full.Ibn Shabba also narrated it in Akhbar al-Madinah (1/281) through the route of Abdul-Hameed bin Jafar, from Hatim bin Abu Kurayb, but restricted to the final part only, without mentioning the story of hanging the cluster of dates in the masjid. Abu Dawud (1608), Nasai (2495), and Ibn Majah (1821) all narrated it through the route of Abdul-Hameed, restricted to the story of hanging the cluster of dates in the masjid.Hakim said, "This is a hadith sahih in isnad," and likewise Ibn Hajar in Fath al-Bari (4/90) graded its isnad sahih after attributing it to Ibn Shabba.I say, its isnad is hasan because of Salih bin Abu Urayb, for a group of narrators related from him, and Ibn Hibban listed him among the trustworthy, so his hadith here is deemed hasan since it has a basis, except that his statement "forty years" contains something strange, and the mention of forty does not occur in Ibn Hibban's version. As for what appears in Ibn Shabba's history, "Hatim bin Abu Kurayb," I have not come across anyone known by this name, nor is there among the narrators from Kathir bin Mura anyone known by this name, so Allah knows best whether this is a printing error or an old error present in the manuscript of Ibn Shabba as such.The story of hanging the cluster of dates is mentioned in the book on zakat through the route of Salih bin Abu Urayb.