and to the limits of their own knowledge. When they fail to find within themselves anything that yields certainty about a given matter, they assume that others must be in exactly the same position—though they have no real evidence that the means of attaining knowledge are in fact absent from those others. At times they will even set up flimsy arguments to prove that no one else can know it, much as many people do with speculative reasoning, deduction, and analogy: if someone does not keep pace with them in their method of inquiry, in the proofs they marshal, and in the sharpness of their minds, they conclude that he cannot know what they know.

Yet many people acquire extensive knowledge by way of transmitted reports, narration, and the inferences drawn from them; anyone who has not shared in what they have heard, or in what they have ascertained about the reliability of the transmitters and the content transmitted, and who lacks their thorough familiarity with all this, cannot grasp what they grasp.

For that reason, the people of rational reflection possess avenues that the people of transmitted reports do not know, and the people who rely on auditory transmission possess avenues that bare intellect alone cannot discover. Accordingly, the people of rational reflection have numerous paths and proofs demonstrating the Messenger’s truthfulness and prophethood that remain unknown to the scholars of ḥadith and reports, while those scholars possess—through the concurrently transmitted ḥadiths and the widely attested signs familiar to them—evidences by which they are certain of the Messenger’s veracity, even though the others are unaware of them.

Indeed, the ways of knowing the Creator and attesting to His Messenger may differ from one community to another; each may have its own path or paths unknown to others, even while all share in affirming faith in Allah and in His Messenger. Thus every people has proofs and evidences distinct from those of others. In fact, what has reached them through mass transmission of the Prophet’s states may well have been conveyed by transmitters