For centuries Sunni scholars had critiqued freely, sometimes viciously, Hadiths from the esteemed Sahih Bukhari and Sahih Muslim collections. It was only when the foundations of the classical Sunni tradition were challenged in the modern period by the Salafi movements and even more so by the appearance of Islamic modernists, that a skeptic like Sidqi was called an ‘unbeliever’ for rejecting the Hadith of the Fly. Similarly, for well over a millennium the Catholic Church had sensed no great need to declare the Latin Vulgate Bible unified and immune from textual criticism. Only after some
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