The Musalsal and an Illustration

He—may Allah have mercy on him—said:

10 – A musalsal, say, is any report that comes with a single, recurring trait—
for instance: “Indeed, by Allah, the young man related to me….”

Among the categories of ḥadith is the musalsal; in the poet’s scheme this is the eighth type. Linguistically, the word is the passive participle of salsala, “to link one thing to another in a chain.”

Technically, it is a narration in which the transmitters agree upon and convey a fixed wording or a fixed circumstance. In other words, the narrators concur on a particular description—whether it concerns the manner of transmission, the state of the transmitter, or something else.

A musalsal is studied with regard to both the chain (isnād) and the text (matn), for the serial quality may appear in both, or in one without the other.

The practical benefit of a musalsal is that it signals the narrator’s precision in preserving the report. One well-known example is the ḥadith of Muʿādh ibn Jabal, may Allah be pleased with him, in which the Prophet—peace and blessings be upon him—said to him: “I love you, so never fail to say after every prayer: ‘O Allah, help me to remember You, to thank You, and to worship You in the finest manner.’”⦗1⦘

This narration became musalsal: every transmitter, when he wished to relate it, would first say to his student, “I love you, so never fail to say…,” and then complete the ḥadith. It is deemed musalsal because the narrators all preserved this identical phrasing.

The same applies were someone to say, “So-and-so narrated to me while we were at lunch,” and then pass the report to his own student while the two of them were likewise at lunch, saying, “So-and-so narrated to me while we were at lunch,” and so on down the chain. Such a case would also be called musalsal.