he concludes with certainty that the report concerning Muʿāwiyah is either false, with no basis in fact, or has been distorted, and that its narrator transmitted it through an unsound channel, the defect arising from a break in its chain of transmission.

It has also been said: Even if this hadith could serve as evidence, it would be anomalous, because it contradicts what reliable, firmly established transmitters narrated from Anas, the people of Medina, and the people of Syria. For a hadith to be established as authentic, it must be neither anomalous nor affected by a hidden defect. This report is both anomalous and defective, if it is not the result of poor retention on the part of one of its narrators.

The principal evidence relied upon by those who wrote in support of reciting the basmalah aloud and of the obligation to recite it is that it was written in the Quran manuscript in the same script as the Quran, and that the Companions kept the Quran free of anything that was not part of it.

Their opponents rejected this evidence without justification, saying, for example: Something can be established as Quran only by conclusive proof; if this were conclusive proof, anyone who disagreed with it would be an unbeliever. Abū Bakr ibn al-Tayyib al-Bāqillānī and others adopted this approach. Relying on this argument, they claimed to know with certainty that al-Shāfiʿī was mistaken in considering the basmalah part of the Quran. They argued that nothing may be established as Quran except through mass transmission, that no such mass transmission exists here, and that one must therefore conclude with certainty that it is not part of the Quran.

The correct assessment is that this argument can be countered with an equivalent argument. They may be told: On the contrary, one can be certain