anything other than that. Al-Shāfiʿī, al-Bukhārī, Aḥmad—in one of the two reports from him—and others all ruled the report that speaks of three or four bowings to be weak. The Prophet—may Allah bless him and grant him peace—performed the eclipse prayer (ṣalāt al-kusūf) only once, and that dubious report claims he prayed it on the day his son Ibrāhīm died, whereas the sound narrations describing two bowings place them on that very same day. When an error of this kind occurs, the authentic hadiths themselves contain evidence that exposes it as a mistake.

Likewise, whenever al-Bukhārī relates a hadith through several lines of transmission and some of those lines contain wording errors, he includes in the same place the routes that make the error apparent, as we have explained at length elsewhere.

In the same way, if it is alleged that some wording of the earlier scriptures has been altered, within those very books there is material that reveals the mistake. We have already stated that Muslims do not claim that every single copy in existence, from the time of Muhammad—may Allah bless him and grant him peace—in every language of the Torah, the Gospel, and the Psalms has had its wording changed, for I do not know