The most recent Western scholarship on Hadiths has shown that such wide-scale forgery was highly improbable. Textual analysis and archeological evidence can take us back reliably to within a century of the Prophet’s death, and as far back as that horizon the Sunni science of Hadith transmission and law seems to have been an honest if hotly contested undertaking. As for the first crucial century of Islam, beyond its broad outlines, it lies out of historical sight.
