Ignorance Of. There are numerous examples of this which have gained popularity and were expanded upon seeking to make plentiful the knowledge relating to these books and others abridged making easy their understanding. This was prior to the coming of the memorizer and jurist Taqiyy ad-Deen Aboo ‘Amrin ‘Uthmaan ibn al-Salah ‘Abd ar-Rahmaan ash-Shahruzuuree, who settled in Damascus. He gathered, at the time he had become a teacher of hadith at the Ashrafiyyah school, his well known book, editing the various disciplines mentioned in it. He dictated it piecemeal and, as a result, did not succeed in providing it with an appropriate order. He occupied himself with the various works of al-Khatib, gathering his assorted studies, adding to them from other sources the essence of their benefits. So he combined in his book what had been spread throughout books other than it. It is due to this that people have focused their attention upon it, following its example. Innumerable are those who rendered his book into poetry, abridged it, sought to complete what had been left out of it or left out any extraneous information; as well as those who opposed him in some aspect of his work or supported him. Discussion of validity The science of hadith has not been without critics. According to Muhammad Husayn Haykal, "despite the great care and precision of the Hadith scholars, much of what they regarded as true was later proved to be spurious." He goes on to quote Al-Nawawi (1233–1277), who stated that "a number of scholars discovered many hadiths" in the two most authentic hadith collection Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim "which do not fulfill the conditions of verification assumed by these men" (i.e. by the hadith collectors Muhammad al-Bukhari and Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj). Among the criticisms made (of non-sahih as well as sahih hadith) of is that there was a suspiciously large growth in their number with each generation in the early years of Islam; that large numbers of hadith contradicted each other; and that the genre's status as a primary source of Islamic law motivated the creation of fraudulent hadith. Modern Western scholars in particular have "seriously questioned the historicity and authenticity of the hadith", according to John Esposito, maintaining that "the bulk of traditions attributed to the Prophet Muhammad were actually written much later." According to Esposito, Schacht "found no evidence of legal traditions before 722," from which