Criticism of Hadith thus provides "certainty of knowledge" of what Muhammad said, in fact it is only the much rarer subset of sahih -- "mutawatir" hadith -- that provide certain knowledge. "Mutawatir" means the report "of a large number of narrators whose agreement upon a lie is inconceivable. This condition must be met in the entire chain from the origin of the report to the very end." However, according to Wael Hallaq, "the bulk of hadith with which the traditionists dealt, and on the basis of which the Jurists derived the law" were known as "ahad" — i.e. non-"mutawatir" hadith; Hadith without "textually
Criticism of Hadith to be obsessed with isr’iliyyat, i.e. tales from Jewish lore about earlier prophets. According to author Israr Ahmed Khan, traditional methods used to establish authenticity of hadith rely almost entirely on the personal characters of the reported narrators, and fail to pay enough attention to the actual content of the hadith being evaluated. Among the problems he sees in the traditional hadith analysis are: the inability of some narrators to maintain preciseness of the report, textual conflicts among reports, ignoring textual analysis when the hadith was reported by a narrator of good character, and probability of fabrication of hadith. Related