Usool al Hadith - Forever Islam

hadeeth narrations. So much so that the Baghdadi scholar, Yahyaa ibn Ma‘een (d.233AH), said, “There are four kinds of people who never became mature duringtheir life; among them is he who writes down hadeeths in his own town and nevermakes a journey for this purpose.” 8The basic method of criticism employed by hadeeth scholars was accordingto Ibn al-Mubaarak’s (118-181 AH) statement, “To find an authentic statement,one needs to compare the words of scholars with each other.” 9 This was themethod employed by scholars from the very early times. By gathering all therelated hadeeths, comparing them carefully with each other, the scholars wereable to judge the accuracy of their teachers. The method of comparison waspracticed in a number of different ways. The following are the four main ways:1. Comparison between the hadeeths of different students of the samescholar.2. Comparison between the statements of the same scholar at different timesin his life.3. Comparison between oral transmission of the scholar and written texts.4. Comparison between a narrated hadeeth and its related Qur’aanic texts.1. Comparison between Different StudentsThis method can be demonstrated by the case of the third century scholar, IbnMa‘een (d. 233AH) who went to Moosaa ibn Ismaa‘eel in Basrah, a student of thegreat scholar Hammaad ibn Salamah, and asked him to read the books ofHammaad to him. When Moosaa asked if he had read the books to any otherstudents of Hammaad, Ibn Ma‘een replied that he had read them to seventeenother students. Moosaa asked him what the purpose was of all these differentreadings, to which Ibn Ma’een replied, “Hammaad ibn Salamah committedmistakes and his students added some more mistakes to his. So I want todistinguish between the mistakes of Hammaad and those of his students. If I findall of Hammaad’s students committing the same mistake, then the source isHammaad. If I find the majority saying one thing and a single student8 Studies in Early Hadith Literature, p. 50.9 Jaami‘ by al-Khateeb, 5a. quoted in Studies in Early Hadith Literature, p. 52.