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
Introduction to the Science of Hadith al-Ṣalāḥ, in his "Introduction", codified the terminology established by those scholars before him based upon his reading of their works. He did so by citing some of those scholarly statements in the earlier works and deducing from them common terms and definitions in the manner of a scholar authoring a book of "fiqh" (jurisprudence). In this manner, his book was based upon those principles established by the earlier hadith specialists combined with some elements of "fiqh". An example of this would be the inclusion of the division of hadith into "mutawātir" and "āḥād". He therefore only mentioned the statements of