The People Behind the Hadith: Narrators, Chains and How They Were Judged

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Deen · Hadith

Every hadith you have ever heard quoted came with a list of people attached, even if the list was left off the poster. Somebody heard it, somebody else took it from them, and so on for two or three centuries until a compiler wrote it down with the names in front. This article is about those names: who they were, how later scholars judged them, and what the arguments over their reliability look like from the inside.

I wrote a companion piece, How a Hadith Is Judged, on the grades themselves (ṣaḥīḥ, ḥasan, ḍaʿīf and the rest). I will not repeat that here. This one stays with the people, and it ends with an explorer where you can tap your way up five real chains, one of them Twelver Shia and one of them weak.

This is a research article, not a fatwa. The grading of narrators is a specialist field with centuries of internal debate, and nothing here should be used to settle a question of practice. If you need a ruling, please ask a qualified scholar you trust.

Contents

1. When people began asking for names
2. The modern argument about chains
3. Generations, and the Companions
4. The vocabulary of criticism
5. The critics and their books
6. The Twelver science of rijāl
7. Some of the people in the chains
8. Women in the chains
9. Chain explorer
10. Reading a chain yourself
11. Glossary

When people began asking for names

An isnād is the part of a hadith that comes before the words attributed to the Prophet ﷺ. It reads like a relay in reverse: “So-and-so told us: So-and-so told us, from So-and-so, who said: I heard the Messenger of Allah say…” The text itself is the matn. A compiler such as al-Bukhārī or al-Kulaynī begins with his own teacher and works back.

The best-known statement about where this habit came from sits in the introduction to Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim. It is a saying of the Basran scholar Muḥammad ibn Sīrīn (d. 110/728), not a hadith of the Prophet, and Muslim includes it with its own short chain:

لَمْ يَكُونُوا يَسْأَلُونَ عَنِ الإِسْنَادِ، فَلَمَّا وَقَعَتِ الْفِتْنَةُ قَالُوا سَمُّوا لَنَا رِجَالَكُمْ فَيُنْظَرُ إِلَى أَهْلِ السُّنَّةِ فَيُؤْخَذُ حَدِيثُهُمْ وَيُنْظَرُ إِلَى أَهْلِ الْبِدَعِ فَلاَ يُؤْخَذُ حَدِيثُهُمْ

“They did not use to ask about the isnād. When the fitna happened, they said: name your men to us. So the people of the Sunna would be looked at and their hadith taken, and the people of innovation would be looked at and their hadith not taken.”

Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, Introduction 27, from Ibn Sīrīn. sunnah.com gives no grade line for Muslim’s introduction.¹

Two other lines from the same introduction are quoted almost as often. Ibn Sīrīn again: “This knowledge is religion, so look carefully at whom you take your religion from.”² And ʿAbd Allāh ibn al-Mubārak: “The isnād is part of the religion. Were it not for the isnād, anyone could say whatever he liked.”³

The difficulty is the word fitna. It means civil strife, and the early Muslims had several. Pavel Pavlovitch, who surveyed the argument in 2018, sets out the positions neatly. Joseph Schacht took it to mean the third civil war of 126–132/744–750, which would push the isnād well into the second Islamic century (and required him to doubt that Ibn Sīrīn said it at all). M. M. al-Azami read it as the first civil war, between ʿAlī and Muʿāwiya, in 35–40/656–661. G. H. A. Juynboll showed that when early sources use the word on its own they usually mean the second civil war, between the Umayyads and the Zubayrids, and that reading has become the common one. Pavlovitch himself narrows it further, to al-Mukhtār’s revolt in Kufa in 66–67/685–687.⁴

So even on a sceptical reading, people were asking for names by the late first century of Islam. What they did with the answers is the subject of the rest of this piece.

The modern argument about chains

It would be dishonest to write about isnāds without mentioning that a good part of Western scholarship spent the twentieth century doubting them. It would be just as misleading to stop at the doubters.

Schacht

Joseph Schacht’s The Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence (1950) argued that most legal hadith attributed to the Prophet ﷺ took shape in the second Islamic century, as rival schools of law pushed their doctrines back onto more and more authoritative figures: first Successors, then Companions, finally the Prophet. On this view chains grew backwards. He leaned on an argument from silence (if a hadith that would have settled a dispute is never cited in it, it probably did not exist yet) and on what he called the “common link”, the point where many chains for one hadith converge on a single transmitter, whom he tended to treat as its real author.⁵

Azami

Al-Azami answered at length, first in Studies in Early Ḥadīth Literature and then in a book-length critique, On Schacht’s Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence (1996). He argued that Schacht misread some of his own sources, that the argument from silence assumes we have every early text and that every early scholar knew every report, and that a full study of the chains does not support calling common links forgers.⁶⁵

Motzki and isnād-cum-matn analysis

Harald Motzki came at Schacht from a different angle. Instead of rebutting him point by point, he took a large early source, the Muṣannaf of ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Ṣanʿānī (d. 211/826), and reconstructed the material one Meccan teacher, Ibn Jurayj (d. 150/767), had taken from his own teacher ʿAṭāʾ ibn Abī Rabāḥ (d. 114/732). The profile of that material, he argued, is hard to explain as forgery, and it shows Meccan jurists appealing to the Qurʾān and to the Prophet ﷺ in the first century, earlier than Schacht allowed.⁷⁵ Motzki and Gregor Schoeler also developed what is now called isnād-cum-matn analysis: collect every version of a report, and check whether the differences in wording line up with the differences in the chains. If they do, the chains are probably telling the truth about who passed what to whom.⁸

Juynboll and the common link

G. H. A. Juynboll kept Schacht’s common link but made it a precise tool, with a vocabulary of “partial common links”, “spiders” and “dives” for chains that look independent but are probably not.⁹⁸ The disagreement between him and Motzki comes down to what the convergence point means. Juynboll treated the common link as the place where the wording was created; Motzki argued that the important common links were the first systematic collectors and professional teachers of hadith, which is exactly what you would expect a real transmission to look like.¹⁰

You will see a common link for yourself in the explorer: “Actions are by intentions” runs through one man at each level until Yaḥyā ibn Saʿīd al-Anṣārī, and then scatters. Classical critics called that shape gharīb at the top and well known below; Ibn Ḥajar said he had searched all his life and could not make up a hundred students of Yaḥyā for it, whatever others claimed.¹¹ Juynboll and Motzki would draw the same diagram and argue about what it means. For a balanced, readable map of all of this, Jonathan Brown’s Hadith: Muhammad’s Legacy in the Medieval and Modern World is the book I would hand a friend.¹²

Generations, and the Companions

Before a critic can ask whether a narrator is reliable, he has to ask whether the narrator could have met the person he quotes. That is why rijāl books sort people into ṭabaqāt, layers or generations. The broad scheme is familiar: the Companions (ṣaḥāba), who met the Prophet ﷺ as believers; the Successors (tābiʿūn), who met Companions; and the followers of the Successors (atbāʿ al-tābiʿīn).

Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī (d. 852/1449) used a finer grid of twelve in his Taqrīb al-Tahdhīb, with an example for each so that readers could calibrate. The second layer is the senior Successors, “like Ibn al-Musayyab”; the third the middle Successors, “like al-Ḥasan and Ibn Sīrīn”; the fourth those who took mostly from senior Successors, “like al-Zuhrī and Qatāda”. By the seventh we reach the senior followers of the Successors, “like Mālik and al-Thawrī”; the tenth includes Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal, the eleventh al-Bukhārī, and the twelfth al-Tirmidhī and the youngest teachers of the six compilers.¹³ When a Taqrīb entry ends “min al-khāmisa”, “of the fifth”, this is the scale it means. A chain in which a man of the tenth layer quotes a man of the fourth directly deserves a second look.

How the Companions are treated

Here the two great traditions part ways, and it is worth stating each in its own terms.

In Sunni hadith criticism the Companions are not graded. They are presumed upright (ʿudūl) unless proven otherwise.¹⁴ You can see this in the structure of the Taqrīb itself. Ibn Ḥajar’s first rank is not a grade at all: it is simply “the Companions: I state that plainly, because of their honour”.¹³ In practice this means a chain is judged up to the Companion and no further, and a report in which a Successor quotes an unnamed Companion is not weakened by the missing name.

Twelver Shia scholars do not accept a collective presumption of that kind. On their view the Companions were no different from other Muslims in this respect, and each one’s truthfulness has to be established individually; loyalty to the Prophet’s family after his death weighs heavily in that assessment.¹⁵¹⁴ The practical consequence is that the Sunni and Shia literatures do not only disagree about particular men; they disagree about where a chain’s scrutiny is allowed to stop.

Both positions are argued from scripture. Sunni scholars cite verses such as 9:100, which says of the first Emigrants and Helpers, and those who follow them in goodness, that “Allah is pleased with them and they are pleased with Him”,⁵⁴ and the Prophet’s ﷺ words in al-Bukhārī’s Ṣaḥīḥ: “The people of my generation are the best, then those who follow them” (Bukhārī 2652).⁵⁵ Twelver scholars point to the very next verse, which says that “some of the people of Medina” are hypocrites who “are not known to you” (9:101),⁵⁴ and to a report, also in al-Bukhārī’s Ṣaḥīḥ, in which a group of the Prophet’s companions are driven away from his pool on the Day of Resurrection and he is told, “You have no knowledge as to what they innovated after you left” (Bukhārī 6585).⁵⁶ Who those people were is the point of dispute. In a parallel version al-Bukhārī records the Kufan scholar Qabīṣa saying, “They are the apostates who apostatised in the time of Abū Bakr, and Abū Bakr fought them” (Bukhārī 3447),⁵⁷ a gloss Sunni writers often cite; Twelver writers do not limit the report in that way. Each side has its own reading of the other’s texts, and neither set of verses names anyone.

The vocabulary of criticism

The science is called al-jarḥ wa-l-taʿdīl, literally “wounding and vouching”. Over three centuries the critics built a vocabulary precise enough that a single phrase could tell a later reader how far to trust a man. The most compact version is Ibn Ḥajar’s, in the introduction to the Taqrīb. He wrote that he would give each narrator “a judgement that includes the soundest thing said about him and the fairest description of him, in the briefest words”.¹³ Here are his twelve ranks, in his own terms.

Ranks and wording from the introduction to Ibn Ḥajar’s Taqrīb al-Tahdhīb; the “in practice” column is the usual reading of these terms in later handbooks, simplified.¹³

Two details in that list are easy to miss. Rank five explicitly includes people “accused of a kind of innovation, such as tashayyuʿ (Shia leanings), qadar, naṣb, irjāʾ or tajahhum, with a note of who propagated it and who did not”.¹³ In other words, doctrine is recorded, but it is not by itself a reason to drop a truthful narrator. And rank six, maqbūl, is conditional in a way that trips up modern readers. It does not mean “accepted”; it means acceptable where someone else corroborates him, and “soft” where nobody does.

Three ways a good narrator can still let you down

Much of the Taqrīb’s real information sits in the clauses after the grade. Three recur.

Tadlīs is concealment. A narrator who heard a report through an intermediary quotes the older man with a vague verb, “from so-and-so”, so that the gap is hidden. Critics distinguished degrees. Sufyān ibn ʿUyayna is “reliable, a memoriser, a jurist, an authority, except that his memory changed late in life, and he sometimes practised tadlīs, but only from reliable men”.¹⁶¹⁷ Al-Walīd ibn Muslim, a much-used Damascene narrator, is “reliable, but he did a great deal of tadlīs and taswiya”, the second being the worse habit of dropping a weak man from between two reliable ones.¹⁶ Ibn Ḥajar wrote a separate treatise ranking the mudallisīn in five tiers, from those “described with it only rarely” (he gives Yaḥyā ibn Saʿīd al-Anṣārī as the example) through men who did it so often that their reports are accepted only where they state plainly that they heard, down to those weak on other grounds, whose reports are rejected even then.¹⁸

Ikhtilāṭ is confusion, usually late in life. The famous case is ʿAbd Allāh ibn Lahīʿa, judge of Egypt, whom the Taqrīb calls “truthful, but he became confused after his books burned; the reports that Ibn al-Mubārak and Ibn Wahb took from him are sounder”.¹⁶¹⁷ Al-Bukhārī’s own teacher Abū al-Nuʿmān ʿĀrim is “reliable and firm, but changed at the end of his life”.¹⁶ With such people the question becomes when a given student heard from them.

Irsāl is skipping a link. When a Successor quotes the Prophet ﷺ directly, the report is mursal; the same word is used loosely for any narrator who quotes someone he did not meet. Yaḥyā ibn Yaʿmar, who carries the Jibrīl hadith, is “reliable, eloquent, and he used to practise irsāl”.¹⁶ Abū Ḥātim judged that one Syrian narrator’s reports from Abū Mūsā al-Ashʿarī were mursal, a verdict that matters a great deal to the fifth chain in the explorer.¹⁹

How the critics disagreed

They disagreed constantly, and they knew it. Al-Dhahabī (d. 748/1348), whose own verdicts fill several dictionaries, divided the critics into three kinds. One kind is “harsh in wounding, cautious in vouching, faulting a narrator for two or three mistakes”; he names Ibn Maʿīn and Abū Ḥātim among them. Opposite them are the lenient, “such as Abū ʿĪsā al-Tirmidhī, Abū ʿAbd Allāh al-Ḥākim and Abū Bakr al-Bayhaqī”. And a third kind, “such as al-Bukhārī, Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal, Abū Zurʿa and Ibn ʿAdī, are balanced and fair”.²⁰ A verdict, in other words, has to be read alongside the temperament of the man who gave it.

The disagreements are often more human than technical. Mālik never narrated from Saʿd ibn Ibrāhīm, the judge of Madina who sits in the middle of the “whoever innovates” hadith. Ibn Maʿīn explained that this was because Saʿd had said something about Mālik’s lineage, and had nothing to do with his hadith.¹⁷ Ibrāhīm, Saʿd’s son, is described by Ibn Ḥajar as “reliable, an authority; he was spoken against, without it damaging him”.¹⁶ Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal said that Muḥammad ibn Ibrāhīm al-Taymī, a link in “actions are by intentions”, narrated manākīr, while Ibn Maʿīn, Abū Ḥātim and al-Nasāʾī simply called him reliable.¹⁷ Ibn Ḥajar’s compromise was “reliable, with some reports only he carries”.¹⁶ The companion article walks through the Ibn Lahīʿa case, where al-Dhahabī and Ibn Ḥajar land on different sides of the line.

The critics and their books

The Sunni tradition remembers a small number of men as the founders of narrator criticism. Their own entries in the Taqrīb are a good place to meet them, because Ibn Ḥajar was writing about his predecessors in the same compressed style he used for everyone else.

Their verdicts were collected by later generations into a chain of books that is itself a kind of isnād. Al-Mizzī wrote Tahdhīb al-kamāl, a vast dictionary of narrators. Ibn Ḥajar abridged it as Tahdhīb al-Tahdhīb, and then, as he explains in his introduction, compressed that again into the one-line entries of the Taqrīb.¹³²¹ Al-Dhahabī worked the same ground from another direction: Mīzān al-iʿtidāl, a dictionary of criticised narrators that reworks Ibn ʿAdī’s al-Kāmil, al-Kāshif for the narrators of the Six Books, and the vast Siyar aʿlām al-nubalāʾ.²² If you only ever consult one book, the Taqrīb is the usual choice, because it gives a verdict rather than a file of opinions.

The Twelver science of rijāl

Twelver Shia scholarship has its own narrator literature, largely independent of the Sunni one, and four early works sit at its core.²³

• al-Kashshī (d. around 340/951) collected reports about narrators and the companions of the Imams, largely without comment of his own. The original is lost. What survives is a selection made by al-Shaykh al-Ṭūsī in 456/1063–4, Ikhtiyār maʿrifat al-rijāl, with 1,151 reports.²⁴
• al-Najāshī (born 372/982; died 450/1058, or after 463/1071) compiled a catalogue of about a thousand Shia authors. He says he wrote it because opponents had taunted the Shia with having “no predecessors and no authors”. It is often ranked first among the early works, for its age and its author’s care.²³ His dates come from al-ʿAllāma al-Ḥillī’s Khulāṣa: born in Ṣafar 372/982, died at Maṭīrābād, near Sāmarrāʾ, in Jumādā al-Ūlā 450/1058.⁵¹⁵²⁵³ The death date sits awkwardly with al-Najāshī’s own book, which records that Abū Yaʿlā al-Jaʿfarī (Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan b. Ḥamza) died on 16 Ramaḍān 463/1071. Al-Khūʾī flagged the clash without settling it; Shubayrī Zanjānī took it to mean al-Najāshī lived on past 463.⁵¹⁵² None of the sources I checked names his birthplace. His father was known as Ibn al-Kūfī, and some place the family in Baghdad.⁵²
• al-Shaykh al-Ṭūsī, who made that selection from al-Kashshī, also wrote a Rijāl of his own and a Fihrist of authors and books.²³²⁴

Al-Kashshī also preserved the idea of aṣḥāb al-ijmāʿ, eighteen companions of the Imams (six each from the circles of al-Bāqir, al-Ṣādiq, and al-Kāẓim and al-Riḍā) on whose reliability the community agreed. Zurāra, Muḥammad ibn Muslim, Abū Baṣīr and Ḥammād ibn ʿĪsā are all on the list. What that consensus covers is disputed: that the eighteen are reliable, that any hadith reaching them is reliable, or even that anyone they quote is reliable. Al-Khūʾī rejected the broadest reading.²⁵

The chain-based four-fold grading (ṣaḥīḥ, ḥasan, muwaththaq, ḍaʿīf) arrived later. It is usually credited to Aḥmad ibn Ṭāwūs and his student al-ʿAllāma al-Ḥillī (d. 726/1325), and I explain it in the companion article. Al-Ḥillī’s Khulāṣat al-aqwāl (693/1293–4) put it into practice with a dictionary in two parts: narrators whose reports are relied on, and narrators whose reports are not.²⁶ The modern summit of the field is Abū al-Qāsim al-Khūʾī’s Muʿjam rijāl al-ḥadīth, twenty-four volumes and 15,676 entries, which lists for each narrator whom he took from and who took from him.²⁷

Should al-Kāfī be graded by its chains?

This is the question that divides Twelver scholars among themselves, and it is sharper than the parallel Sunni question about Bukhārī and Muslim.

The Akhbārī school, associated above all with Muḥammad Amīn al-Astarābādī in the seventeenth century, held that Imāmī traditions recorded in reliable sources, the Four Books above all, are sound in the sense that they certainly come from an Imam, and are to be accepted without examining their transmitters’ doctrine. Astarābādī was “particularly critical of ʿAllāma Ḥellī … for introducing elements of Sunni Hadith criticism by classifying the rejāl”, in Etan Kohlberg’s summary.²⁸ Most Twelver scholars today do not regard any hadith book as wholly reliable, and grade chains.²⁹ Al-Khūʾī, in the introduction to his Muʿjam, rejects the idea that everything in the Four Books is authentic.²⁷

Even so, reverence for al-Kāfī runs deep on both sides. Al-Khūʾī, who did not share the view, records that his own teacher Muḥammad Ḥusayn al-Nāʾīnī used to call picking at the chains of al-Kāfī “the trade of the incapable”.³⁰ Gradings of the whole book exist. A tally that secondary sources usually attribute to Zayn al-Dīn al-ʿĀmilī, al-Shahīd al-Thānī (1505–1559 CE), gives 5,072 ṣaḥīḥ, 144 ḥasan, 1,118 muwaththaq, 302 qawī and 9,485 ḍaʿīf reports.²⁹ Even the total is disputed; counts range from about 15,200 to 16,199, depending on how one numbers.³⁰ In the twentieth century Muḥammad Bāqir al-Behbudi went further and published a Ṣaḥīḥ al-Kāfī, a selection of what he judged authentic.²⁹

Thaqalayn, the online library of Shia hadith, shows al-Majlisī’s grade from his commentary Mirʾāt al-ʿuqūl and whether al-Behbudi included the report. One short chapter of al-Kāfī, “The Fundamentals of Islam” (bāb daʿāʾim al-islām), makes the point on its own: hadith no. 1 is weak by al-Majlisī’s grading, no. 3 is “muwaththaq, like ṣaḥīḥ”, and no. 5 is ṣaḥīḥ, while al-Behbudi included none of the three.³¹ Three reports on one theme, a page apart, and three different verdicts. No. 5 is in the explorer.

Some of the people in the chains

A few names carry an enormous share of the literature. Numbers attached to them need handling with care: the classical counts usually include every chain, so the same saying heard by ten students may be counted ten times.

Women in the chains

ʿĀʾisha is only the most famous. Women narrated from the first generation onwards, and the critics’ verdicts on them are strikingly clean. Al-Dhahabī, whose Mīzān is a catalogue of every narrator anyone ever found fault with, wrote in it: “I do not know of any woman who was accused, or whom they abandoned.”⁴⁰

Later centuries produced women who held some of the most prized chains in existence. Karīma al-Marwaziyya (d. 1069) was an authority on Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī whose students included al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī; the sources credit thirty-nine men and one woman with transmitting from her.⁴¹

The scale of this was largely invisible in English until Mohammad Akram Nadwi’s al-Muḥaddithāt: The Women Scholars in Islam (2007).⁴² That book is the introduction to a much larger Arabic work, al-Wafāʾ bi-asmāʾ al-nisāʾ, published in forty-three volumes in 2021 with entries for about ten thousand women.⁴³ On the Twelver side, al-Khūʾī’s Muʿjam has 135 entries for women transmitters.²⁷

Chain explorer

Five chains, drawn with the source at the top and the compiler at the bottom (the Arabic isnād reads the other way, starting from the compiler). Tap any narrator to see when he died, his generation, where he lived, and what the critics said, with the entry it comes from. The small italic word on each link is the transmission verb the text actually uses; ḥaddathanā (“he told us”) is explicit, ʿan (“from”) is not.

Chains and grade lines from sunnah.com^44454647 and Thaqalayn;³¹ narrator verdicts from the Taqrīb¹⁶ and al-Shāmila;¹⁷ commentary from Fatḥ al-Bārī¹¹ and ʿUmdat al-qārī;⁴⁸ Twelver narrators from al-Najāshī and al-Ṭūsī as reported by WikiShia and Rijāl al-Ḥadīth.³⁷⁴⁹

Reading a chain yourself

None of this makes anyone a muḥaddith, but with two free websites you can check most of what you are told about a chain in ten minutes.

1. Find the report on sunnah.com (or thaqalayn.net for Shia collections) and switch to the Arabic. The chain is the run of names before qāla rasūl Allāh or ʿan al-nabī.
2. Split it at every ح or wa-ḥaddathanā. These mark a second route joining the first, as in Muslim 8a. Draw it as branches if it helps.
3. Read the verbs. Ḥaddathanā, akhbaranā, samiʿtu claim direct hearing. ʿAn does not, and matters only when the narrator is known for tadlīs.
4. Pin down every name. “Sufyān” may be al-Thawrī or Ibn ʿUyayna; “Yaʿqūb” in Bukhārī 2697 is at least three possible men; “Abū Baṣīr” is two. The teachers and students listed in Tahdhīb al-kamāl or al-Khūʾī’s Muʿjam usually settle it.
5. Look each man up in the Taqrīb. The full text with entry numbers is online, and al-Shāmila’s narrator pages collect the Taqrīb line beside other critics.¹⁶¹⁷ Note three things: the grade word, the ṭabaqa, and any clause about tadlīs, ikhtilāṭ or irsāl.
6. Check that neighbours could have met. Ṭabaqāt should step down one or two at a time; death dates should overlap with a working life.
7. Only then compare with the grade line. If sunnah.com says “Ḍaʿīf (Darussalam)” and al-Albānī says “ṣaḥīḥ”, you can usually now see why: one is judging this chain, the other the report across all its routes.

What you cannot easily do at home is the thing the great critics did best: compare every version of a report to find the hidden defect (ʿilla). That is why a single chain that “looks fine” is not the end of the matter, and why the grading of hadith stays a specialist’s job.

Glossary

Isnād / sanad

The chain of transmitters.

Matn

The text of the report.

Rijāl

“Men”: the study of transmitters, and the books about them.

Jarḥ wa-taʿdīl

Criticising and vouching for narrators.

Ṭabaqa

A generation or layer of transmitters.

Thiqa

Reliable: upright and accurate.

Ṣadūq

Truthful: honest, with slightly lighter precision.

Maqbūl / layyin

Acceptable when corroborated / soft when not.

Majhūl

Unknown: too little is known to vouch for him.

Matrūk

Abandoned: too weak to be used even as support.

Kadhdhāb / waḍḍāʿ

Liar / forger.

Tadlīs

Concealing a gap in one’s own chain.

Ikhtilāṭ

Confusion of memory, usually late in life.

Irsāl / mursal

Skipping a link, classically a Successor quoting the Prophet ﷺ directly.

Gharīb / mashhūr

Carried by one person at some level / by three or more.

Common link

In Western scholarship, the transmitter on whom many chains for one report converge.

Aṣḥāb al-ijmāʿ

The eighteen companions of the Imams whose reliability Twelver scholars agreed on.

Sources

1. Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, Introduction 27 (Ibn Sīrīn, “name your men”): sunnah.com/muslim/introduction/26. A saying of Ibn Sīrīn, not of the Prophet; sunnah.com prints no grade line for Muslim’s introduction.
2. Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, Introduction 26 (Ibn Sīrīn, “this knowledge is religion”): sunnah.com/muslim/introduction/25.
3. Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, Introduction 32 (ʿAbd Allāh b. al-Mubārak, “the isnād is part of the religion”): sunnah.com/muslim/introduction/31.
4. Pavel Pavlovitch, “The Origin of the Isnād and al-Mukhtār b. Abī ʿUbayd’s Revolt in Kūfa (66–7/685–7)”, Al-Qanṭara 39:1 (2018), 17–48, doi:10.3989/alqantara.2018.001: PDF. Surveys Schacht, Robson, Juynboll and Azami on the meaning of the fitna.
5. Joseph Schacht, The Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950). Summary of his arguments, and of Azami’s and Motzki’s replies, in “Analyzing Schacht’s Theory and Two of His Critiques: Azami and Motzki”, IlmGate: ilmgate.org.
6. M. M. al-Azami, Studies in Early Ḥadīth Literature (1978 edition) and On Schacht’s Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence (Oxford: Islamic Texts Society, 1996): publisher’s listing.
7. Harald Motzki, The Origins of Islamic Jurisprudence: Meccan Fiqh before the Classical Schools, trans. Marion H. Katz (Leiden: Brill, 2002); reviewed by Gabriel Said Reynolds, Journal of Semitic Studies 50:1 (2005): OUP.
8. “Isnad-cum-matn analysis”, Wikipedia (on Motzki’s and Schoeler’s method, and Juynboll’s terminology): en.wikipedia.org.
9. G. H. A. Juynboll, Muslim Tradition: Studies in Chronology, Provenance and Authorship of Early Ḥadīth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983): Cambridge Core review.
10. Hacer Ayaz, “The Differences in Historical Methodology between Juynboll and Motzki Related to Hadith”, Erzincan Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü Dergisi (2015), 41–46: DergiPark PDF.
11. Ibn Ḥajar, Fatḥ al-Bārī, commentary on Bukhārī 1 (the claim of 700 transmitters from Yaḥyā; his own search): Islamweb.
12. Jonathan A. C. Brown, Hadith: Muhammad’s Legacy in the Medieval and Modern World (Oxford: Oneworld, 2009; 2nd ed. 2017): Google Books; review of the 2nd edition, AJIS.
13. Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī, Taqrīb al-Tahdhīb, introduction (the twelve ranks and the twelve ṭabaqāt, and his method): Arabic Wikisource.
14. “Companions of the Prophet”, Wikipedia (Ibn Ḥajar’s definition; Sunni and Shia views): en.wikipedia.org.
15. “Sahaba”, WikiShia (Sunni and Shia positions on the Companions’ ʿadāla): en.wikishia.net.
16. Ibn Ḥajar, Taqrīb al-Tahdhīb, full text with entry numbers, as used for every “Taqrīb no.” in this article and in the chain explorer: al-Shāmila (Muḥammad ʿAwwāma’s edition, Dār al-Rashīd, 1986, with the printed entry numbers) and books.islam-db.com, which uses the same numbering. For example ʿAlqama b. Waqqāṣ no. 4685, al-Taymī no. 5691, Yaḥyā b. Saʿīd al-Anṣārī no. 7559, Abū Hurayra no. 8426.
17. al-Maktaba al-Shāmila, narrator database (verdicts from the Taqrīb, al-Kāshif, Tahdhīb al-kamāl and others, with page references): for example Ibn Lahīʿa, al-Taymī, Saʿd b. Ibrāhīm.
18. Ibn Ḥajar, Taʿrīf ahl al-taqdīs bi-marātib al-mawṣūfīn bi-l-tadlīs (Ṭabaqāt al-mudallisīn), introduction: al-Shāmila.
19. Al-Ḍaḥḥāk b. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. ʿArzab, al-Shāmila narrator page (Abū Ḥātim: his reports from Abū Mūsā are mursal): shamela.ws/narrator/2950; Ibn Ḥajar, Tahdhīb al-Tahdhīb, entry on al-Ḍaḥḥāk b. Ayman: al-Shāmila.
20. Al-Dhahabī, Dhikr man yuʿtamad qawluhu fī al-jarḥ wa-l-taʿdīl, his three kinds of critic, quoted in Islamweb fatwa 259063: islamweb.net.
21. “Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani”, Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org.
22. “Al-Dhahabi”, Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org.
23. “Rijal al-Najashi”, WikiShia: en.wikishia.net.
24. “Rijal al-Kashshi” (Ikhtiyār maʿrifat al-rijāl), WikiShia: en.wikishia.net.
25. “Ashab al-Ijma’”, WikiShia (al-Kashshī’s list of eighteen, and what the consensus is taken to mean): en.wikishia.net.
26. “Khulasat al-aqwal”, WikiShia (al-ʿAllāma al-Ḥillī, 693/1293–4): en.wikishia.net.
27. “Mu’jam rijal al-hadith”, WikiShia (al-Khūʾī, 24 volumes, 15,676 entries including 135 women; his view of the Four Books): en.wikishia.net.
28. Etan Kohlberg, “Akhbāriyya”, Encyclopaedia Iranica: iranicaonline.org.
29. “Kitab al-Kafi”, Wikipedia (the tally attributed to Zayn al-Dīn al-ʿĀmilī; Behbudi’s Ṣaḥīḥ al-Kāfī): en.wikipedia.org.
30. “Al-Kafi”, WikiShia (al-Kulaynī’s death in 329/941; the different counts of its hadith; al-Nāʾīnī’s remark): en.wikishia.net; al-Nāʾīnī’s words as al-Khūʾī gives them (Muʿjam rijāl al-ḥadīth 1:99), quoted in WikiShia (Arabic).
31. Al-Kulaynī, al-Kāfī, vol. 2, chapter “The Fundamentals of Islam” (bāb daʿāʾim al-islām), nos. 1, 3 and 5, with the gradings of al-Majlisī and al-Behbudi as shown on Thaqalayn: no. 5, no. 3, no. 1.
32. “Who is a Sahabi and why do some of them narrate frequently while others do not?”, Mahajjah (the list from the Musnad of Baqī b. Makhlad, citing Ibn Ḥazm and al-Suyūṭī’s Tadrīb al-rāwī): mahajjah.com.
33. Muhammad Ziyad Batha, “Abū Hurayrah: Was He Truly the Largest Single Source for Ḥadīths?”, MuslimMatters, 19 December 2022: muslimmatters.org.
34. Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 118 (Abū Hurayra: “People say that I narrate too much”): sunnah.com/bukhari:118.
35. “Abu Hurayra”, Wikipedia (Shia critics such as al-Iskāfī; modern critics and their Sunni respondents): en.wikipedia.org.
36. Jamal Ahmed Bashier Badi, Saadeldin Mansour Gasmelsid and Alhafidh Nasution, “The Challenge to Mahmoud Abu Rayyah’s Thoughts on the Significance of Abu Hurairah and Kaʿb al-Aḥbār in Ḥadīth Narration”, Journal of Hadith Studies 9:2 (December 2024): PDF.
37. “Zurara b. A’yan”, WikiShia (dates, al-Najāshī’s assessment, number of narrations in al-Khūʾī’s Muʿjam, the reports of the Imam’s criticism): en.wikishia.net; al-Najāshī’s Arabic wording quoted at almerja.com.
38. “Muhammad b. Muslim”, WikiShia (citing al-Ṭūsī, Ikhtiyār maʿrifat al-rijāl 1:386, and al-Najāshī, Rijāl 325–6): en.wikishia.net; the Arabic of the thirty-thousand report in Baqiyyat Allāh.
39. “Abu Basir” and “Yahya b. Abi l-Qasim al-Asadi”, WikiShia: Abu Basir, Yaḥyā al-Asadī.
40. Abdullah Al-Rashid, “The ‘unknown’ Arab and Muslim women scholars, who taught some of history’s most esteemed men”, Al Majalla, 17 October 2023 (quoting al-Dhahabī’s Mīzān): en.majalla.com.
41. “Karima al-Marwaziyya”, Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org.
42. Nur Saadah Hamisan@Khair, review of Mohammad Akram Nadwi, al-Muḥaddithāt: The Women Scholars in Islam (Oxford: Interface Publications, 2007), Ulum Islamiyyah 27 (2019): uijournal.usim.edu.my.
43. Al-Salam Institute, “Muhaddithat Book” (al-Wafāʾ bi-asmāʾ al-nisāʾ, 43 volumes, Dār al-Minhāj, 2021): alsalam.ac.uk.
44. Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 1, 54 and 6953: bukhari:1, bukhari:54, bukhari:6953; Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim 1907a and 1907b: muslim:1907a, muslim:1907b.
45. Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim 8a: sunnah.com/muslim:8a.
46. Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 2697 and Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim 1718a, 1718b: bukhari:2697, muslim:1718a, muslim:1718b.
47. Sunan Ibn Mājah 1390, graded Ḍaʿīf (Darussalam): sunnah.com/ibnmajah:1390. On al-Albānī’s grading (al-Silsila al-Ṣaḥīḥa 1144) and the other routes, see The 15th of Shaʿbān on this site.
48. Badr al-Dīn al-ʿAynī, ʿUmdat al-qārī, on Bukhārī 2697 (who “Yaʿqūb” was): al-Shāmila.
49. Ibrāhīm b. Hāshim al-Qummī: WikiShia; Rijāl al-Ḥadīth (after al-Khūʾī’s Muʿjam), rejal.masaha.org/332. ʿAbd Allāh b. al-Ṣalt: al-Najāshī, Rijāl p. 217 no. 565, as quoted at erfan.ir.
50. Badri Khaeruman, “On the Truthfulness of Abu Hurayrah in Narrating Hadith”, Jurnal Usuluddin 26 (2007) (al-Iskāfī, and the view of him as Muʿtazilī or Shia; ʿAbd al-Ḥusayn Sharaf al-Dīn’s case): PDF.
51. al-Khūʾī, Muʿjam rijāl al-ḥadīth, entry no. 685, Aḥmad b. ʿAlī b. Aḥmad b. al-ʿAbbās (al-Najāshī), quoting al-ʿAllāma al-Ḥillī on his birth and death and setting it against al-Najāshī’s entry on Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan b. Ḥamza al-Jaʿfarī: al-khoei.us.
52. “Ahmad b. Ali al-Najashi”, WikiShia (citing al-Ḥillī, Khulāṣat al-aqwāl, Qum 1417, p. 73; Shubayrī Zanjānī, “Abu l-ʿAbbās Najāshī”, Nūr-i ʿilm 11, 1364 Sh.; al-Ziriklī, al-Aʿlām 1/172): en.wikishia.net.
53. Sayyid Wahid Akhtar, “An Introduction to Imamiyyah Scholars: Major Shiʿi Thinkers of the Fifth/Eleventh Century”, al-Tawhid 4:4, after ʿAlī Davānī, Mafākhir-i Islām vol. 3: al-islam.org.
54. Qurʾān 9:100–101, trans. Mustafa Khattab, The Clear Quran: quran.com/9/100-101.
55. Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 2652, from ʿAbd Allāh ibn Masʿūd, in al-Bukhārī’s Ṣaḥīḥ: sunnah.com/bukhari:2652.
56. Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 6585, from Abū Hurayra, in al-Bukhārī’s Ṣaḥīḥ: sunnah.com/bukhari:6585.
57. Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 3447, from Ibn ʿAbbās, with Qabīṣa’s comment at the end, in al-Bukhārī’s Ṣaḥīḥ: sunnah.com/bukhari:3447.