100 – He said, “That is what I have been commanded to do.”

101 – I replied, “If you have been commanded to act on the outward reliability of the two witnesses, accepting what appears outwardly—while none knows the unseen except Allah—then realise that we demand of a ḥadith transmitter far more than we demand of a legal witness. We validate the courtroom testimony of men from whom we would not accept a single isolated narration. In the case of the transmitter, we are able to verify his truthfulness or his error through the corroboration of other master preservers and by referring to the Book and the Sunnah; these give multiple indications, whereas nothing similar is possible with legal testimony.”

102 – Yet he persisted in the very distinction I have described: sometimes rejecting a report, at other times accepting part of it and rejecting something identical, despite the explanation I had given of the flaw in that approach and of the inconsistency that necessarily follows from their divergent statements.

103 – In what we have presented here—and in the preceding section of this book—there is conclusive proof against them and against anyone else who holds similar views.

104 – He then said to me, “I have accepted from you that I must receive the reports of the Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, and I have understood—through the evidence you set forth that Allah has made obedience to him obligatory—that those reports convey the meaning he intended. Accordingly, when I accept his report I am, in fact, accepting from Allah, just as I accept whatever the Muslims have unanimously agreed upon and over which they do not differ. I have come to know, as you mentioned, that they neither converge nor differ except upon the truth, if Allah wills.”

105 – “Tell me, then, about matters for which we find neither an explicit text in the Book of Allah—may He be Exalted—nor a report from the Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him: issues about which I hear you being questioned and to which you respond by declaring something obligatory or by invalidating it. How did it become permissible for you to speak as you do regarding such matters? Whence do you know what is right and what is wrong in them? Do you address them through independent reasoning (ijtihad) in search of a specific objective that is hidden from you, or do you speak arbitrarily? Who has authorised you to declare lawful and unlawful and to draw distinctions without any precedent for you to follow? If you allow that for yourself, then it would be equally permissible for anyone else to say whatever crosses his mind, with no precedent to which he can refer and no proof by which his error may be distinguished from his correctness!”