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 "in the early Islamic centuries there could be no better way of promoting a cause, an opinion, or a faction than to cite an appropriate action or utterance of the Prophet." This gave strong incentive to fabricate hadith. According to Daniel Brown, the major causes of corruption of Hadith literature are: Other criticism made of ahadith include Orthodox Muslims do not deny the existence of false "hadith", but believe that through the work of hadith scholars, these false "hadith" have been largely eliminated. al-Shafi'i himself, the founder of the proposition that “sunna” should be made up exclusively of specific precedents