But there might have been some trustworthy narrators who...

But there might have been some trustworthy narrators who used to report hadith from unreliable ones, till the caliphate time of Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz 183 Fearing the bad consequences of people’s additions to hadith and spreading of falsity when correct hadith be rare, as his time witnessed circulation of traditions, in which falsity was made on purpose for no interpretative convenience, like the ones falsified by Ikrimah the slave of Ibn Abbas, 184 and in which the slave (mawla) of Sa’id ibn al-Musayyab was refuted 185 and others, Umar sent a letter to his deputy in administration and judgement on al-Madinah, 186 giving him the order: Collect all the traditions of the Messenger of Allah and write them down, as I am quite afraid about the extinction of knowledge and loss of ‘ulama’.

This was the outset of writing down and collecting of the hadith, as it was never being written in the past 187 ... etc. We conclude this discussion by referring to a critical defect of riwayah. A Critical Defect of Narration How Were Their Narrations Many defects were there for narrating hadith after being forbidden by the Messenger of Allah (S), among which its being not narrated at the time of hearing it, the fact necessitating the narrators to report (hadith) according to the meaning.

The other defect is that they used to practise fraud in narration, in a way that a Companion reporting the…