faced his companion cheek-to-cheek. Naturally, this derivation is purely conventional; otherwise we would have to label every exchange in which two people turn toward one another as mudabbaj. The hadith specialists, however, have limited the term to a specific usage—and there is no harm in agreed terminology.

• A mudabbaj transmission occurs when each peer relates from the other, whether it be a single report or several.

• The distinction is that in a mudabbaj both parties narrate from one another, whereas in riwayat al-aqran (the narration of peers) only one narrates from his counterpart while the other does not reciprocate.