"Ismāʿīl ibn ʿAbd al-Salām from Zayd ibn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān from ʿAmr ibn Shuʿayb. Ibn Qutaybah said in Ikhtilāf al-ḥadīth: He and his teacher are unknown." I said: The ḥadīth has been transmitted through other than their route from ʿAmr ibn Shuʿayb. It was narrated by al-Bazzār (229 - Zawāʾid) through the route of Ismāʿīl ibn Ḥammād from Muqātil ibn Ḥayyān from ʿAmr ibn Shuʿayb with it, and it includes a story. Ibn ʿUrwah mentioned it in "al-Kawākib" (34/161/2) and said: "A strange ḥadīth. ʿImād al-Dīn Ibn Kathīr said: Shaykh al-Islām Taqī al-Dīn Abū al-ʿAbbās Ibn Taymiyyah said: This is a fabricated and concocted ḥadīth by the consensus of the knowledgeable." I said: If Ismāʿīl ibn Ḥammād was the Ashʿarī, their client, then he is truthful. And if he was the grandson of the Imām Abū Ḥanīfah, they have spoken about him. Whichever he was, he was not alone in narrating it, for al-Bayhaqī also narrated it through the route of ʿAbbād ibn ʿAbbād from ʿUmar ibn Dharr, who said: I heard ʿUmar ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz say: If Allāh had willed that He not be disobeyed, He would not have created Iblīs. And Muqātil ibn Ḥayyān narrated to me from ʿAmr ibn Shuʿayb with it, raised [to the Prophet] with the wording of the translation. And this isnād, all its men are trustworthy, with the well-known disagreement regarding ʿAmr ibn Shuʿayb, so the isnād is good in my view. ʿAbbād ibn ʿAbbād is Ibn ʿAlqamah al-Māzinī al-Baṣrī, and Muqātil ibn Ḥayyān is trustworthy, one of the men of Muslim, and he is not Muqātil ibn Sulaymān the exegete who is accused. Perhaps Shaykh al-Islām Ibn Taymiyyah mistakenly thought he was the narrator of this ḥadīth, otherwise, there is no reason to judge it as fabricated based on its isnād, as it contains no accused person, nor based on its matn, as it is not objectionable. The people of the sunnah have agreed that all acts of obedience and disobedience are by the will of Allāh﵎, nothing of that occurs against His will﷾, but He loves obedience and dislikes disobedience. And I have seen how the rightly-guided caliph used this ḥadīth as evidence. ʿAbd Allāh ibn Imām Aḥmad also narrated it from him in "Zawāʾid al-Zuhd" (p. 298) from