Hadith of the Twelve Successors will be anything other than twelve. The twelve successors from the hadith (traditions of the prophet Muhammad) are already known as The Twelve Imams. Two hadiths form the basis and understanding of the 12 successors of the Prophet Muhammad: the hadith of the two weighty things and the hadiths regarding the 12 khalifs. One of the most authentic hadith (traditions of the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad) is Hadith thaqalain in which the Prophet Muhammad tells the muslims that he is leaving behind two weighty things, The quran and his ahlul bayt. Al-Tirmidhi in his Sunan records the following tradition:
Criticism of Hadith According to Racha El Omari, early Mutazilites believed that hadith were susceptible to "abuse as a polemical ideological tool"; that the "matn" (content) of the hadith -- not just the "isnad" -- ought to be scrutinized for doctrine and clarity; that hadith "supported by some form of "tawātur"", i.e. by a large number of "isnād" strands, each beginning with a different Companion, were valid. In writing about "mutawatir" (transmitted via numerous chains of narrators) and "ahad" (any ahadith that is not "mutawatir") and its importance from the legal theoretician's point of view, Wael Hallaq notes the medieval scholar Al-Nawawi argued