tures. Thus, they replaced one name with another; that is, they made a change and substituted the Family of Imran for the Family of Mul:lammad."

The response to making deductions on the basis of this group of traditions is that, besides their dubious chains of transmission, they are in contradiction of the Book, the Sunna, and the consensus of the Muslims, including those who hold the view of taiJ-rif: that not a single word was added to the Quran. A large number of religious scholars have maintained that there is a consensus that no additions have been made to the Quran, and that everything that is between its two covers is part of there‌ vealed Quran. Among those who have asserted the existence of a consensus are al‌ Shaykh al-Mufid, al-Shaykh al-Tusi, al-Shaykh al-Baha,I, and other prominent scholars of lmami Shiism. Moreover, we already noted the traditions which cite the arguments [of Ali b. Abi Talib] and which indic.ate that no additions were made to the Qur,an.

Fourth Group of Traditions

These are the traditions which indicate that taiJ-rif of the Quran consisted of omis‌
sions only.
The response to the arguments based on this group is that the evidence that was produced to negate any addition in the text of Amir al-Mu,minin [Ali] is admissible in this case, too; and if that is not admissible in the cases of some of them, they must be rejected because they contradict the Book and the Sunna. In one of our teaching sessions, we discussed another response to this claim, which may be the nearest pos‌ sibility to the truth of the.matter, and which we have omitted here for fear of unnec‌ essarily prolonging the discussion. We shall, however, return to this subject in an‌ other context of our discussion.
Moreover, most of these traditions, or, rather, the majority of them, are of weak transmission, and some of them are not even plausible in their content. It is for this reason that many renowned scholars have declared that these traditions should nec‌ essarily be either interpreted allegorically or rejected.
Among those who expressed this opinion was al-MuJ:!aqqiq al-Kalbasi, when, as reported by others, he said:

The traditions that speak about taf:trif are against the consensus of all the community except for those of them whose opinion has no value.... Moreover, the claim that there have been omissions in the Book has no basis of truth; otherwise, it would have attained fame and uninterrupted transmission, as usually happens in the case of major events.... And this is one•of them, or, rather, the.most important.

This opinion was also expressed by al-MuJ:!aqqiq al-Baghdadi, a commentator of al-Wafiya, who wrote a separate treatise on this subject. In the latter work, he says, "Those traditions that indicate the occurrence of omission [in the Quran] should necessarily be allegorically interpreted or rejected. Certainly, if a tradition contra‌ dicts the proof provided by the Book, the uninterruptedly narrated Sunna, and the consensus, and if, further, it is not possible to interpret it allegorically, or to explain it in one way or another, then it must be rejected."