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376chapter sixlegitimate to target public defamations as a form of injustice thatneeded to be wiped out. One should also note that the Prophet (ß)did not use the definite article al- when he talked about the kab§"irbut left it as undefined, indeterminate and unspecified as he foundit in the qur"§n. This indicates that when he proposed his understandingof what ‘major sins’ are, he knew that it was (only) relevant forhis own period of time and for his own society and did not rule outthe possibility that the perception of such sins might be subject toconsiderable change.C. The companions and major sinsAfter MuÈammad’s death the efforts to accurately define what constitutesa ‘major sin’ and an ‘absolute taboo’ were seriously underminedby the sudden circulation of obscure ÈadÊth traditions that, forexample, issued a bizarre number of kab§"ir, ranging from nine toseven hundred, and which were all treated as absolute taboos. Weobserve the tendency to blend together major and minor sins, andproscriptions and absolute taboos so that clear demarcation lineseventually disappeared and all the different types and classes oforders and prohibitions were perceived equally and indiscriminatelyas ‘what God has prohibited’. Even then it was obvious how weakthe chains of transmission back to the Prophet (ß) were.D. The generations after the time of the companionsThis situation became aggravated within two generations after theProphet’s (ß) death. We see an explosion of hadÊths circulated in thedifferent centres of the Empire and which could not possibly all goback to the Prophet (ß). Bear in mind the fact that MuÈammad (ß)received his first revelation at the age of forty and that he diedtwenty-three years later at the age of sixty-three. He had thereforetwenty-three years as a prophet, that is—based on a lunar calendar—195,408hours, to discuss and debate the matters of the newfaith (supposing, for the sake of the argument, that he did not sleepa single minute throughout a twenty-four hour day), in addition tohis role as a prophet and messenger who transmitted God’s revelationto the people. If we assume that MuÈammad (ß) had roughly85,000 hours left to fulfil his prophetical role (in his ten years inMedina), and since we have now in front of us a total of 750,000hadÊths that were circulated after his death from his Medinan period(of which Im§m AÈmad reported 40,000 in his Musnad alone), which