were sincere and honest in their endeavours to produce correct and well authenticated traditions of their Prophet's precepts and practice; but, as Sir William Muir remarks, "the exclusively oral character of the early traditions deprives them of every check against the licence of error and fabrication."
Sir William Muir has very ably dwelt upon the unsatisfactory character of Muhammadan tradition in the first volume of his "Life of Mahomet," to which Sayyid Ahmad Khán has written a reply in a supplement to his essay on Muhammadan tradition. The learned Sayyid is in this, as in almost everything he writes on the subject of religion, his own refutation. Sir William Muir reveals to the public "the higegledy-piggledy condition, the unauthenticity and the spuriousness of Muhammadan traditions," and surely Sayyid Ahmad Khán does but confirm the same when he writes: "All learned Muhammadan divines of every period have declared that the Qurán only is the Hadees mutawátir; but some doctors have declared certain other Hadeeses also to be Mutawátir, the number, however, of such Hadeeses not exceeding five. Such are the Hadeeses that
