I was asked about the authenticity of this hadith:
“The Prophet ﷺ said: ‘None of you should drink while standing; and if anyone forgets and does so, he must vomit it out.’ (Sahih Muslim)
A:
There are two hadiths saying that the Prophet ﷺ said not to drink standing. They are in Sahih Muslim, and this is what they say:
Qatada, on the authority of Anas that: The Prophet ﷺ expressed his disapproval of drinking while standing.
Qatada, on the authority of Abu Isa al-Aswari, on the authority of Abu Sa’id al-Khudri that: The Prophet ﷺ expressed his disapproval of drinking while standing.
Neither of these narrations match the criteria of imams Malik, Bukhari or Nasai (the latter is often more strict than Muslim). Imam Muslim then followed these by the Hadith you are asking about which comes via Abu Hurayra and which adds that you should vomit out the water you drank while standing. This Hadith is very very weak and does not meet Muslim’s condition. It’s one of his shawahid, weak narrations that do not match his critera that he adds after those narrations that he do match his criterea. If the other two Hadith didn’t exist he would have never put this one there with by itself.
Imam Bukhari has a Chapter titled:
On (the permissibility of) Drinking While Standing
In this chapter Imam Bukhari narrates two separate incidents from Ali ibn Abi Talib drinking while standing on purpose to teach people and then saying “Some people dislike drinking while standing but I have seen God’s Messenger ﷺ doing what I just did.”
Then Imam Bukhari also adds Ibn Abbas’ Hadith of seeing the Prophet ﷺ drinking Zamzam while standing.
Commenting on Bukhari’s Chapter Heading, Ibn Battal al-Maliki says:
‘Bukhari is indicating in his chapter heading that no Hadith against drinking while standing is authentic according to him.’
This approach of rejecting the hadiths of dispproval because they all suffer from weaknesses and go against stronger hadiths is that favoured by a great number of Maliki and Hanbali jurists.
Ibn Hajar disagrees because he considers the Hadiths in Muslim to be authentic. So he says: ‘It is more likely Bukhari thinks that since there are conflicting Hadiths, the ruling (of impermissibility) cannot be established.’
Now the Hadith of Ali ibn Abli Talib in Sahih Bukhari does show that there were those who believed one should not drink while standing early on. The Musannaf of Abd al-Razzaq gives us more detail: We find that Abu Hurayra narrated a hadith against drinking while standing, and this is what drove Ali to respond by calling for water to be brought to him and drinking it while standing to show people that Abu Hurayra was mistaken or misunderstood. There is also a lot of uncertainty and conflict in the chains of transmission as well as differences in the wording of what Abu Hurayra was narrating so that it cannot be fully established. According to some narrations, he said, ‘If people knew what was in their stomachs after drinking while standing, they would vomit it out.’ According to another, he said that if you drink while standing, Satan drinks with you. According to the strongest of all these chains, he simply repeated exactly what was narrated by Anas and Abu Sa’id in Sahih Muslim: that God’s Messenger ﷺ told people not to drink while standing (Musnad Ahmad, hadith 8335).
Even though no narration against drinking while standing matches the criterea of Malik, Bukhari and al-Nasa’i, it does appear that Abu Hurayra was narrating something against it, and most probably Anas and Abu Sa’id al-Khudri too (or maybe just one of them because the narrations of Anas and Abu Sa’id both come from Qatada and some experts feared there may have been a mistake and that it only comes from one of them). However, we also know that Ali ibn Abi Talib, Ibn Abbas, and others spoke up against this to assure Muslims that God’s Messenger ﷺ himself used to sometimes drink while standing. The greatest hadith master of Medina among the Followers, Imam al-Zuhri, narrates that the great Companions Aisha and Sa’d ibn Abi Waqqas also saw no problem with drinking while standing (Musannaf Abd al-Razzaq). Therefore we have at least Ali, Ibn Abbas, Aisha, and Sa’d ibn Abi Waqqas assuring us of its permissibility, as well as weak narrations from Ibn Umar, Abdullah ibn Amr ibn al-As and Kabsha bint Thabit (all three of which are in Tirmidhi).
Permissibility is the opinion of Imam Bukhari, Nasa’i, Tirmidhi, Abu Dawud, and most imams of jurisprudence (except Ibn Hazm al-Zahiri). Although they have differing explanations and approaches to dealing with these apparently conflicting narrations, the vast majority of scholars hold that the hadiths against drinking while standing are there to teach us the better way of drinking, and so they are a teaching of adab (propriety), nothing to do with halal or haram. They have also agreed that he who drinks while standing does not need to vomit it out.
People need to be careful quoting from books of hadith, even books like Sahih Muslim, if they do not have training in how to use them and cannot distinguish between the hadiths that Imam Muslim relies on, and considers authentic, and those he adds below them which he does not rely on and do not meet his criteria.
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