Innovations are rejected

The charter against bidʿah. The religion was completed during the Prophet's ﷺ life; what he did not do in worship, no one after him gets to add. Note the scope: 'this affair of ours' means the religion, not everyday life.

Whoever introduces into our affair something that is not from it, it is rejected. A short hadith with long consequences.

Islam is not a religion built by accumulation — adding new acts of worship as the centuries roll on. It is a religion preserved by transmission. The five prayers were five in the time of the Prophet ﷺ, and they are five today. The way of dhikr, the timings of fasts, the rites of ḥajj — all of it has come down chain by chain, narrator to narrator, from the most truthful generation to the next.

This is why scholars spent lifetimes verifying chains of transmission. Not from suspicion of innovation, but from love of the original. To worship Allah by what He prescribed is sweeter and more accepted than worshipping Him by something we invented, however sincere the inventor.