Third Principle: Rejecting the Mudallas Report

Tadlīs (concealment) is of three kinds:

1. Tadlīs of the isnād: This is when a narrator reports from someone he actually met a statement he never heard from him, giving the impression that he did. There may be one or more intermediaries between them. Characteristically, he avoids clear formulas such as “So-and-so informed us” or “So-and-so narrated to us,” and instead says, “So-and-so said,” or “from So-and-so,” and similar wording that suggests direct hearing.

2. Tadlīs of the shaykh: Here a narrator transmits a ḥadīth he genuinely heard from his teacher but identifies that teacher by a name, kunyah, lineage, or description by which he is not commonly known, so that the teacher remains unrecognized.

3. Tadlīs of equalisation (tadlīs al-taswiyah): In this case the mudallis has heard a ḥadīth from a reliable teacher, who in turn had heard it from a weak transmitter, and that weak transmitter relates it from another reliable teacher. The mudallis omits his teacher’s weak shaykh and presents the report as though his reliable teacher narrates directly from the second reliable transmitter, using an ambiguous term such as “from” (ʿan). Thus the chain appears composed entirely of trustworthy narrators, and he can truthfully affirm the link between himself and his teacher, since he did hear it from him. Nothing in the isnād then signals a defect except to specialists in criticism and the detection of hidden flaws. For this reason it is the worst kind of tadlīs, followed by the first and then the second.⦗1⦘

The ruling regarding a narrator proven to practice tadlīs—even if he is otherwise upright—is that none of his reports are accepted unless he explicitly states