The muttaṣil report and its criterion
The author—may Allah have mercy on him—said:
9 – “Any chain in which every transmitter has heard it in person,
and whose isnād reaches the Chosen One, is the muttaṣil.”
His word “al-Muṣṭafā” (the Chosen One) comes from aṣ-ṣafwah, meaning “the choicest part.” Linguistically its original form is “al-muṣtafā” with a tāʾ. The phonetic rule is that when the letters ṣād and tāʾ meet and one of them is preceded by a vowel-less consonant, the tāʾ is converted to a ṭāʾ, giving the form “al-muṣṭafā.”
The preposition lām in “li-l-Muṣṭafā” functions here with the meaning “to,” that is, “to the Chosen One.” The muttaṣil is the seventh category of hadith mentioned in the poem.
Scholars have given two definitions for it. According to the wording of the author, a muttaṣil report is a marfūʿ narration that each transmitter received by direct hearing from the person above him.
Thus the author stipulates two conditions for a report to be called muttaṣil:
- Direct audition—every narrator must have heard it from the one he cites.
- That it be marfūʿ, reaching back to the Prophet ﷺ.
Because of his phrase “to the Muṣṭafā,” anything mawqūf or maqṭūʿ is not termed muttaṣil; in such reports the chain does not reach the Prophet ﷺ. Likewise, any marfūʿ report that has a missing link is not called muttaṣil, for it is munqaṭiʿ.
On the face of the author’s words, if a narrator does not explicitly mention hearing—or something equivalent—the report is not considered muttaṣil; explicit audition is indispensable, and hearing from