the route of Ḥammād ibn Salamah from Muḥammad ibn ʿAmr ... (then he mentioned the first narration), then he said: "Ibn al-Sakan said: Muḥammad ibn al-Shurayd is not known among the Companions, and I have not seen any mention of him except in this narration." The ḥadīth also came from another route from Abū Hurayrah, in which the man's name is not mentioned. It is from the narration of al-Masʿūdī from ʿAwn ibn ʿAbd Allāh from his brother ʿUbayd Allāh ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿUtbah from Abū Hurayrah: that a man came to the Prophet (ṣallá Allāhu ʿalayhi wa-sallam) with a black non-Arab slave girl and said: "O Messenger of Allāh! I am obliged to free a believing slave." The Messenger of Allāh (ṣallá Allāhu ʿalayhi wa-sallam) said to her: "Where is Allāh?" She pointed to the sky with her index finger. He said to her: "Who am I?" She pointed with her finger to the Messenger of Allāh (ṣallá Allāhu ʿalayhi wa-sallam) and to the sky, meaning: you are the Messenger of Allāh. He said: "Free her, for she is a believer." It was narrated by Abū Dāwūd (3/588/3284), Ibn Khuzaymah also, al-Bayhaqī in "al-Sunan" (7/388), and Aḥmad (2/291); all of them through the route of Yazīd ibn Hārūn from him. I said: Yazīd heard from al-Masʿūdī—who is ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿUtbah—after his memory had deteriorated; as Ibn Numayr said, as quoted by al-Dhahabī in "al-Kāshif" and others. Therefore, his statement in "al-ʿUlūw": "Its isnād is ḥasan," is not ḥasan as I mentioned in my book "Mukhtaṣar al-ʿUlūw" (81-82), but it now appears to me that it is better than ḥasan, for two reasons: first, I found with Ibn Khuzaymah two corroborators for Yazīd, namely Asad ibn Mūsá (Asad al-Sunnah) and Abū Dāwūd—who is al-Ṭayālisī, known for "al-Musnad," although the ḥadīth is not in it—and he is from Basra. ʿAbd Allāh ibn Aḥmad mentioned in "al-ʿIlal" from his father that he said: