and they likewise understood that the wording appearing in one of al-Bukhārī’s routes of transmission—“Hellfire will not be full until Allah creates another people for it” (1)—is the result of an error and gives no cause for alarm.

Commentary
This too is something we know to be mistaken. The notion that, after all who deserve the Fire have entered it, some space will remain, whereupon Allah will create a new group of people solely to cast them into the Fire, is incorrect. Rather, the Fire will go on receiving its inhabitants while it says, “Are there any more?”, until Allah places His Foot upon it, whereupon its parts will contract together and it will say, “Enough, enough” (2). Moreover, were Allah to create people just to burn them, that would contradict His justice and mercy. Thus the report is known to be unsound even though it is found in Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī; the particular narrator in this chain erred, and the alternative chain is sounder than it.

In this matter people have fallen into two extremes. One group, made up of speculative theologians and the like—those far removed from familiarity with hadith and its specialists—cannot distinguish the sound reports from the weak ones, so they doubt the authenticity of narrations, or withhold judgment on them, even though these narrations are conclusively established in the eyes of qualified scholars. The other group consists of those who claim to follow hadith and to possess knowledge of it; whenever they encounter a wording in a report narrated by a trustworthy transmitter, or they see