When they came to a Hadith recounting how ‘God created Adam, and he was sixty arms tall,’ and that, after Adam fell, ‘mankind has continued to shrink since that time,’ Ibn Hajar noticed a problem. The houses he had seen carved out of cliffs by ancient, bygone peoples were the same size as those in his own time. Their inhabitants had not been any taller than his fellow Cairenes. Ibn Hajar admitted frankly that ‘to this day, I have not found how to resolve this problem’ and promptly moved on to the next Hadith.5
