this. Were the matter not so clear, we would have cited more than a hundred instances.

By adopting this position, those who deny that reports from the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, yield knowledge have violated the necessarily known consensus of the Companions, the consensus of the Successors, and the consensus of the imams of Islam. They have thereby agreed with the Mu‘tazila, the Jahmiyya, the Rāfida, and the Kharijites, who transgressed this inviolable principle, and were followed by some legal theorists and jurists.

Apart from them, no precedent for this position is known among the imams. Rather, the imams explicitly stated the opposite. Those who expressly affirmed that an individual report yields certain knowledge include Mālik, al-Shāfi‘i, the followers of Abū Hanīfa, Dāwūd ibn Ali and his followers, such as Abū Muhammad ibn Hazm.” (1).

As for the specious argument (2) entertained by those who deny the authority of individual reports, it is that such reports yield probability—by which they mean a preponderant probability—because an individual narrator may err, be inattentive, or forget. They maintain that, by consensus, a preponderant probability must be acted upon in legal rulings, whereas, in their view, it may not be accepted in matters of creed.

To support this, they cite certain verses that prohibit following conjecture, such as the saying of Allah Most High: “They follow nothing but conjecture, and conjecture is of no avail against the truth” (28) [al-Najm: 28].

The response to this specious argument is that their appeal to this verse and others like it is untenable,