know as a matter of necessity that these men are liars, and that you are greater liars and more ignorant than they, then it is forbidden for you to act upon these hadiths or to judge in accordance with what they entail.

This statement may be challenged on several grounds:

First:

It may be said to these Shia: On what basis do you claim that those who transmitted these hadiths in former times were trustworthy, when you neither lived in their time nor know their circumstances? You have no compiled books on which you can rely for reports about them, by means of which the trustworthy may be distinguished from others; nor do you have chains of transmission whose narrators you know. Indeed, your knowledge of much of what you possess is less reliable than the knowledge many Jews and Christians have of what they possess. Rather, those people have books composed for them by Hilāl and Shammās(1) . . ., and the majority of them possess nothing that contradicts those books.

As for you, the majority of Muslims have always impugned your narrations and exposed(2) your lies, while you yourselves have no knowledge of their circumstances. Moreover, the abundance and prevalence of lying among the Shia from the time of Alī to the present day are known through mass transmission that cannot be concealed(3). You know that hadith scholars hate the Khārijites and transmit many authentic hadiths concerning them from the Prophet—may Allah bless him and grant him peace—and al-Bukhārī narrated