that, in the generation of the Successors, the leading scholars should have uttered words of disbelief and misguidance without anyone objecting to them. If the statement, “He created Adam in the image of the Most Merciful,” were false, that would have been their situation.

Furthermore, this wording has also been transmitted through Abū Hurayrah. When a hadith is transmitted through two different chains whose narrators have not colluded, each transmission supports and corroborates the other and serves to verify it. Indeed, this may even yield certainty. The concern in transmission is either deliberate lying or poor memory. If the narrators are known not to lie deliberately, or if the report comes from narrators who would not ordinarily collude in fabricating the same wording, only poor memory remains a possibility. If each has retained the same account as the other, this indicates that it has been accurately preserved—especially when a narrator has proved through experience not to forget, owing to his care in preserving both wording and meaning. This is why even those who reject mursal reports (reports with a gap in their chain of transmission) accept such a report as evidence when it is transmitted through a route