Holy Qur’ān, and as such a secondary source of the teaching of Islām.

Method of counting the number of different reports

European critics are generally under the impression that when the authors of the Muṣannafāt set to work, there was such a vast mass of spurious ḥadīth that the collectors did not credit more than one or two per cent of the prevailing mass as being genuine, and that these were taken to be genuine on the slender authority of the reliability of transmitters without any regard to the subject-matter. 30 The impression that the vast mass of reports taught at different centres in the third century was fabricated is based on a misconception. It is true that Bukhārī took cognizance of 600,000 reports and knew some 200,000 of these by heart. It is also a fact that his book contains no more than 9,000 ḥadīth. But it is not true that he found the other 591,000 reports to be false or fabricated. It must be clearly understood that those who were engaged in the dissemination and study of Ḥadīth looked upon every report as a different ḥadīth when even a single transmitter was changed. Let us, for instance, take a ḥadīth for which the original authority is Abū Hurairah. Now Abū Hurairah had about 800 disciples and the same ḥadīth may have been reported by, say, ten of his disciples with or without any variation. Each of these reports would, according to the collectors, form a separate ḥadīth. Again, suppose each of the transmitters of Abū Hurairah’s ḥadīth had two reporters, the same ḥadīth would then be counted as twenty different reports. The number would thus go on increasing as the number of reporters increased. At the time when Bukhārī applied himself to Ḥadīth in the first decade of the third century of Hijrah, there were schools of Ḥadīth at different centres, and hundreds of students learned and transmitted reports to others. In a chain of ordinarily four or five transmitters, consider the number of reports that would arise from the same Ḥadīth on account of the variation of transmitters, and it is easy to understand that 600,000 did not mean so many reports relating to various subjects, but so many reports coming through different transmitters, many of them referring to the same incident or conveying the same subject-matter with or without variation of words. That this was the method of