So-called “forged” prophetic traditions (“hadith mawdu’, pl. a hadith mawdu’a”) have a paradoxical status in Sunni Muslim thought. Textual criticism based on the theory of authenticity reveals a double process of compilation and exclusion of this literature in the 10th and 11th centuries. In the 12th century, compilations of forged prophetic traditions emerge with the aim to make these texts known as well as to exclude them from the sphere of prophetic hadith. However, the forged traditions were indeed transmitted (and used as tools of religious legitimization) in scholarly and popular milieux. There is an element of the transmission of religious texts in the Middle Ages that is outside the authority of the guardians of orthodox Islam.