for the grandmother is one-sixth; his prohibition against marrying a woman together with her paternal or maternal aunt; and his saying, “On crops watered by the sky the due is one-tenth, while on those irrigated by water-wheels and animal-driven devices it is half of one-tenth.”

Only a small segment of the ummah heard rulings like these—far fewer than the number who witnessed his miracles—yet the entire community is unanimously agreed on transmitting them. These rulings have reached us by mass transmission and are known with absolute certainty to be part of his religion.

So if matters of this kind have been recurrently transmitted within the ummah with unanimous agreement, how much more so the signs that were even more famous and manifest to those who beheld them, whose knowledge of those miracles was clearer than their knowledge of these rulings. They conveyed those signs to those who were absent, and it follows inevitably that the mass transmission of those miracles in the ummah is stronger and more evident. For this reason, one can scarcely find a Muslim who has not come to know many of those signs, heard about them, and passed them on to others—unlike many of the legal rulings that, although mass-transmitted and unanimously accepted by the scholars, remain unknown and unheard of by a large number of people.

Should someone object, “These are precisely the kinds of events that people would be eager and motivated to transmit; had they really occurred, such eagerness and motivation would have ensured their transmission, and they would have been mass-transmitted,” we reply: “Exactly so—and praise belongs to Allah—people’s eagerness and motivation have indeed…"