No Consensus on Twenty Rakʿahs:
From the foregoing investigation it has become clear that every report attributing to the Companions—may Allah be pleased with them—that they prayed twenty rakʿahs of tarāwīḥ is unsound. Accordingly, the claim made by some that “the Companions unanimously agreed that tarāwīḥ consists of twenty rakʿahs” is unreliable, for it rests on weak evidence, and whatever is built on weakness is itself weak. For this reason, the eminent scholar al-Mubārakpūrī stated categorically in his Tuḥfah that “it is a baseless allegation.”

This is further supported by the fact that, had such a consensus truly existed, it would not have been permissible for later generations to differ—yet they did in fact disagree, praying fewer than this number and more, as will be shown shortly. Assertions of consensus of this sort should therefore make researchers wary of hastily accepting every ijmāʿ cited in certain books, for careful scrutiny has proven that much of what is mentioned there cannot be authenticated.

A further example is the alleged consensus reported by some that witr must be three rakʿahs, even though authentic reports from more than one Companion show that they preferred to pray only one rakʿah, as will be discussed shortly before Chapter Seven.

For this reason the meticulous scholar Ṣiddīq Ḥasan Khān said in the introduction to his book al-Sirāj al-Wahhāj min Kashf Maṭālib Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim ibn al-Ḥajjāj (1/3): ⦗84⦘