Isnad

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article or section does not cite its references or sources.
Please help improve this article by introducing appropriate citations. (help, get involved!) This article has been tagged since August 2006.

Part of a series on the Science of hadith
Terminology
History of Hadith — ... Ilm ar-Rijal — ... Narrators of hadith — ...
Terminology
Isnad — chain of narrators Matn — hadith text Riwayah — narration
technical terms
Musnad — supported Mursal — hurried Ahaad — single narrator Munqati — broken muttasil — uninterrupted isnad Gharib — strange/rare Shadhdh — irregular Munkar — denounced/rejected Mudraj — interpolated Da'if jiddan — very weak Isra'iliyat
Regarding authenticity
Mutawatir — agreed upon Sahih — authentic Hasan — fair Da'if — weak Mawdo — fabricated Mudtarib — shaky
Other
Sharh — comments Hadith collection This box: view • talk • edit

A hadith was originally just an Arabic story. As the stories began to be used more formally it became common to provide each story with an isnad. The story proper was then called the matn.

[edit] Use

The isnad for a story (later even books were provided with isnads) is the list of successive narrators reaching back to the original narrator.

According to Gregor Schoeler, the Jewish schools of the Talmudic period (200CE-500CE) had their method of authentication by isnād introduced to Islam by Jewish converts ^[1].

In more recent times the nomenclature - hadith, isnad and matn - has become restricted to mean those stories for which the original narrator was the prophet Muhammad or the original narrator told a story involving the prophet.

Stories about earlier days were commonplace in Arabia long before the time of the prophet. If a story-teller was speaking about an earlier generation he might well name who told him the story. In the earliest surviving Arabic literature about Islamic origins (from around 150/767) the conventional isnad was three terms long. As time went on the isnads got longer.

In the earliest literature the original narrator or his interest was as often as not some one other than the prophet. But when following his grand-master, Abu Hanifah through his step-father and eventual master Abu Yusuf and his co-disciple Muhammad Shaybani - and in contrast with his earlier master, Malik - al-Shafi'i (died 204/820) convinced everyone that the only acceptable legal precedences were those demonstrably coming from the Prophet, the focus changed to those hadiths which could be proven to have come from the Prophet himself. Moreover because each hadith was a potential legal precedent the authenticity of each hadith became a matter of crucial importance.

One important element in determining the authenticity of a hadith was the reliability of the individual narrators who were named in the isnad. Specialized biographical studies called Ilm ar-Rijal were made to determine how trustworthy each narrator was and, using that information, how authentic each hadith was.

Scholars emerged who devoted their lives to checking each narrator in the isnad. They asked about the narrators like:

Are these individuals reliable reporters?
Could these individuals have met, given where they were in time and space?
Is there any record of their meeting or collaborating or having any common interests?
Are the individuals of sound morals and not motivated by politics, local tradition, ideology, money or factional concerns of sects?

At the same time would ask about the authenticity such questions as:

Is the reported tradition logically consistent? Is it actually rational?
Does it linguistically reflect the words of the Prophet, in his vocabulary?
Is the vocabulary consistent with Classical Arabic?
Does the vocabulary include terms used by clergy but never by the prophet himself (for example, the word sunnah)?
Does the reported tradition agree with the Qur'an?
Is it the kind of matter or thing which we can reasonably believe Muhammad to have said?

It is not very clear just how many hadiths, good and bad, there are. Most likely they would be counted in the millions. These scholars categorized all (or all they could find) of these hadiths as authentic, agreeable, weak, narrated by a weak source, missing a transmitter, provably false, etc.