that thou believe in Allāh and His angels and the meeting with Him, and His messengers, and that thou believe in life after death” (Bu. 2:37). The report is a lengthy one and only the first portion relating to the subject of discussion has been quoted. This same report is also related in Muslim through three different channels. In the first channel, the four narrators are the same as in Bukhārī, and the words are also almost the same: “The Holy Prophet was one day sitting outside among a number of people when there came to him a man and said, What is faith, O Messenger of Allāh? The Holy Prophet replied, That thou believe in Allāh and His angels and His Book and the meeting with Him, and His messengers, and that thou believe in the life after death (M. 1:1). In his second channel, the first three narrators are again the same as in Bukhārī and the report is narrated in the words quoted above. In his third channel, only the first two narrators are the same, the rest being different, and a change is introduced into the words, the portion relating to the Holy Prophet’s reply now assuming the following form: “That thou believe in Allāh and His angels and His Book and the meeting with Him, and His messengers, and that thou believe in the life after death and that thou believe in qadar, in the whole of it” (M. 1:1). It will be noticed that when the narrators are the same as in Bukhārī (with the exception of the last narrator from whom Muslim took his words), the words of the ḥadīth are almost the same, there being only an addition of the words “and His Book.” These words have either been added by one of Muslim’s narrators, as the natural result of faith in messengers of God, or they have been left out by one of Bukhārī’s narrators, as being included in faith in the Divine messengers. Otherwise, the fundamentals of faith are exactly the same and so even the words in both narrations. Even when Muslim has only Bukhārī’s three top narrators, the words of the report are still the same. But in the third channel, where only two top narrators of Bukhārī, Abū Hurairah and Abū Zar‘a, are retained, the words are changed, and quite a new element is introduced into it by the addition of faith in qadar, which the original does not contain. This shows beyond the shadow of a doubt that the words “faith in qadar” were added by the third narrator, and that these words were not spoken either by Abū Hurairah or even by the next narrator, Abū Zar‘a, and thus there