and Khalaf ibn Hishām and Abū Jaʿfar—matters that no one outside their circle knows.

If a single specialist among the people of knowledge—whether in jurisprudence, medicine, arithmetic, grammar, or the Qurʾānic readings—and even an individual king, has an inner circle who know particulars of his affairs that no one else knows and who affirm them with certainty, then how much more so for the one who, in the eyes of his followers, stands higher than every scholar and outranks every monarch. They are the most eager of all people to know his circumstances, the most scrupulous in verifying them, and the most resolute in rejecting any falsehood about him. Indeed, they composed numerous works on everyone who ever transmitted anything concerning him, recording in them the states of those who conveyed his ḥadith, together with the related assessments of discrediting and accrediting. They scrutinised the matter with a precision and thoroughness unmatched by any other nation, and unmatched within this very community except by the hadith specialists themselves.

This demonstrates that they know the condition of their Prophet better than anyone else knows the condition of his own exemplar, and that they are better informed about the truthfulness or falsehood of a narrator than anyone else is about the veracity or mendacity of those who transmit from his authority.