Sahih Muslim 1065
صحيح مسلم#1065Sahihحَدَّثَنَا أَبُو الرَّبِيعِ الزَّهْرَانِيُّ، وَقُتَيْبَةُ بْنُ سَعِيدٍ، قَالَ قُتَيْبَةُ حَدَّثَنَا أَبُو عَوَانَةَ، عَنْ قَتَادَةَ، عَنْ أَبِي نَضْرَةَ، عَنْ أَبِي سَعِيدٍ الْخُدْرِيِّ، قَالَ قَالَ رَسُولُ اللَّهِ صلى الله عليه وسلم " تَكُونُ فِي أُمَّتِي فِرْقَتَانِ فَتَخْرُجُ مِنْ بَيْنِهِمَا مَارِقَةٌ يَلِي قَتْلَهُمْ أَوْلاَهُمْ بِالْحَقِّ " .
Abu Sa'id al-Khudri reported Allah's Messenger (ﷺ) as saying:There would be two groups in my Ummah, and there would emerge another group (seceding itself from both of them), and the party nearer to the truth among the two would kill them (the group of the Khawarij)
Scholarly Authentication
The label above is the grade most of these scholars gave, each scholar counted once — one dissenting opinion no longer speaks for all of them. If any scholar calls a narration fabricated, that verdict is shown instead, whatever the others say. When they judged only its chain of narrators (“Isnaad”), the label says “Sound chain”. Each scholar's own wording:
Every narration in Sahih Muslim is accepted as Sahih (authentic) by the established status of the book.
Sahih Muslim 1065 is the standard (Abd al-Baqi) number; this narration is #2459 in the MuslimGPT index.
In-book reference: 12:196