What is the ruling on kissing the head?

The questioner : Kissing the head?

The Shaykh : Kissing the head: what is established in the Sunnah is only in a mursal report, in which it was said that when Ja'far came from Abyssinia after the conquest of Khaybar, he (peace and blessings be upon him) said: This is a mursal hadith, and a mursal is not valid unless a corroborating narration comes to strengthen it, and we have not found a corroborating narration for it. However, it came through a connected chain, which is the same mursal, and it contains weakness. Since the mursal has a sound chain of narration, the stronger position is that it is mursal rather than musnad or connected.