While making jarh and ta’dil of the narrators an obligation...

While making jarh and ta’dil of the narrators an obligation incumbent upon every narrator whatever his status be, they could not transgress the boundaries of the Sahabah, as they held them all to be reliable not liable to criticism, nor sarcasm can be levelled at them. What they said in this regard: “Their carpet had been folded”(i.e. there is no room for attacking them).

The wonderful point here being that they adopt such a stance while the themselves used to criticize each other and even charging each other with impiety, as stated before and will be manifested later on in this book. In his al-Taqrib, al-Nawawi writes: The Sahabah are altogether reliable, those who were involved in the fitnah and others. Al-Dhahabi, in his Risalah, said about the trustworthy narrators: 655 If we open the door of jarh and ta’dil, a good number of…