As for people of knowledge and religious integrity, they do not deem a transmitted report true or declare [it] (1) false merely because it accords with what they believe. Rather, a man may transmit numerous hadiths concerning the virtues of the Prophet—may Allah bless him and grant him peace—his nation, and his Companions, yet they reject them because they know them to be false. They also accept many hadiths because they are authentic, even when their apparent meaning conflicts with what they believe—either because they hold that those hadiths have been abrogated, or because they admit an interpretation of them that they do not reject, or for some similar reason.

The governing principle concerning transmitted reports is that they must be referred to the leading authorities and scholars of transmission. Whoever shares their expertise knows what they know. Authenticity or weakness must also be established through evidence independent of the report itself. Both are indispensable.

Otherwise, the mere statement, “So-and-so narrated it,” is not accepted as proof by either Ahl al-Sunnah or the Shia. No Muslim accepts every hadith narrated by every compiler as proof. Thus, whenever any hadith is adduced as proof, the first thing we require is that its authenticity be established.

Merely attributing it to a narration by al-Thalabī or someone like him is no evidence of its authenticity, by agreement of those knowledgeable in transmitted reports. This is why no hadith scholar narrated it in any of the books to which people refer for hadith—neither [in] (2) the Sahīh collections, nor in the Sunan collections, nor the Musnads (3), nor elsewhere—for the falsity of such a report is evident to anyone with even the slightest knowledge of hadith.

In the estimation of scholars, this is on a par with the notion held by some common people—and even by some who mingle among the ranks of the jurists—that the Prophet—may Allah bless him and grant him peace—followed one of the four schools of law, and that Abū Hanīfa and others like him lived before the Prophet—may Allah bless him