Hadith of the Quran and Sunnah al-Thaqalayn" multiple times in multiple settings in multiple wordings. They argue that Muhammad said "Hadith al-Thaqalayn" at Mount Arafat during his Farewell Sermon, at Ghadir Khumm, in the mosque of Medinah, during his last illness, and at many other places and times. The Shi'as believe that Muhammad said this hadith so many times because he wanted to stress how important it was that the Muslims only take his own descendants as leaders. The Shi'as believe that this hadith is mutawattir, meaning that it has been related so many times by so many people that there is no doubt about its
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