their transmission routes, the qualities of their narrators, and the grounds warranting belief in them to the extent that hadith scholars do. These scholars have absolute certainty concerning most of the authentic hadith texts in the two Sahīh collections, as we have explained at length elsewhere.
As for the second premise, they may not know the meanings of the Quran and hadith. Some of them say that evidence conveyed through words cannot yield certainty about the speaker’s intent. We have explained the falsity of this claim at length elsewhere.
In interpreting the Quran and hadith, many of them consult only what those who share their doctrine say, adopting their interpretations. They cite as evidence the texts that agree with them and reinterpret those that contradict them. For many of them, following a revealed text was never, in reality, their foundation at all. This applies to the major innovations, such as those of the Rāfidah and the Jahmiyyah. The originator of Rāfidī doctrine was a heretic who began by deliberately telling outright lies that he knew to be lies, like those Jews whom Allah describes as knowingly fabricating lies about Him. Then others came after them who supposed that what those earlier people had fabricated was true, yet remained in doubt about it. As the Most High says:
“Indeed, those who inherited the Scripture after them are in disquieting doubt about it.”
Likewise, the Jahmiyyah have no textual evidence whatsoever for denying the divine attributes, Allah’s being above the Throne, and similar matters—not a verse, a hadith, or a report from the Companions,