Likewise, if someone were to inform us that a man had ruled(1) between Umar and Uthman, or between Uthman and Ali; or that the call to prayer used to be given for the Prophet—may Allah bless him and grant him peace—before the Eid prayer, the eclipse prayer, or the prayer for rain; or that more than one Friday prayer was held in his city on Fridays; or that more than one Eid prayer was performed on Eid day; or that he used to perform the Eid prayer at Mina on Eid day; or that the people of Mecca used to perform the prayers in full behind him at Arafat, Muzdalifah, and Mina; or that(2) he used to combine the two prayers at Mina just as he shortened them; or that he made fasting obligatory in a month other than Ramadan; or that he made a sixth prayer obligatory at midmorning or midnight; or that he made pilgrimage to a House other than the Kaaba obligatory; or that a group of Arabs or others had rivaled the Quran with discourse resembling it—or other such claims—we would know that this person was lying. We know that these things did not occur because what would necessarily have followed from them is absent. Had they occurred, humanity in general—and our Ummah in particular, for religious reasons—would have had every motive and incentive to transmit them. Since none of the learned transmitted them, let alone mass-transmitted them, it is known that they are false.

The transmission of an explicit designation appointing Ali to the caliphate falls into this same category. We know that it is false in many ways, for no one (among the scholars) transmitted this designation through a chain of transmission(3) that was sound, let alone through mass transmission. Nor is it reported that anyone mentioned it during the time of(4)