on payment of jizyah, whereas the former are not allowed to remain on payment of jizyah (1). The latter possess a scripture, or a semblance of one, whereas the former followed a lying fabricator. Yet his caller to prayer used to say, “I bear witness that Muhammad and Musaylimah are the messengers of Allah,” and they placed Muhammad and Musaylimah on an equal footing.

The history of Musaylimah is well known in all the books that discuss such matters: works on hadith, Quranic exegesis, military campaigns, conquests, jurisprudence, legal theory and theology. Knowledge of it has reached even maidens in their secluded chambers. Indeed, historians devoted entire books to the campaigns against the apostates, calling them books of “Apostasy” and “Conquests,” such as the book “Apostasy” by Sayf ibn Umar (2), and works by al-Wāqidī and others. In them, they recount details of the apostates’ history and the campaigns against them, just as they recorded similar details concerning the military campaigns of the Messenger of Allah—may Allah bless him and grant him peace—and the conquests of Syria.

Some of these accounts are established by mass transmission among scholars and the general public alike; some were transmitted by trustworthy narrators; some are reports with interrupted or incomplete chains of transmission, which may be true or false; and some are known to be weak and false.