realizes beyond doubt that they were not people who deliberately invented hadith, let alone those of an even higher standing—Muhammad ibn Sīrīn, al-Qāsim ibn Muhammad, Saʿīd ibn al-Musayyab, ʿUbayda al-Salmānī, ʿAlqama, al-Aswad, and their peers.

The only thing one might fear from any truthful narrator is an inadvertent mistake, for error and forgetfulness often befall human beings. Yet there were hadith masters whose distance from such slips became well known, as was the case with al-Shaʿbī, al-Zuhrī, ʿUrwa, Qatāda, al-Thawrī, and the like—particularly al-Zuhrī in his day and al-Thawrī in his. Indeed, some would say that no error is known from Ibn Shihāb al-Zuhrī, despite the vast number of traditions he related and the breadth of his memorization.