Elevation and Declension

The author—may Allah have mercy on him—said:
14. “Each isnād whose men are few is ‘lofty’;
Its opposite is the chain that has ‘declined.’”

These are two categories of ḥadith—the thirteenth and fourteenth in the poem—namely the lofty (ʿālī) and the declined (nāzil).

Elevation or declension is an attribute of the isnād (chain of transmission), and elevation itself falls into two kinds:

1. Numerical elevation. The author alluded to it when he said, “each chain whose men are few….” Every isnād with a small number of transmitters is considered lofty, whereas one with many transmitters is regarded as declined. The reason is that the fewer the intermediaries, the fewer the chances of error. An example will make this clear:
   If the narrators are Zayd → ʿAmr → Bakr, the possibility of error lies with any one of the three; thus, we have three potential points of error. But if the chain is Zayd → ʿAmr → Bakr → Khālid → Sufyān, we now face five possible points of error. Plainly, the smaller the likelihood of error, the closer the report is to acceptance.

   Accordingly, if a ḥadith reaches a narrator through five intermediaries and is also transmitted through another route that has only three, the latter chain is the lofty one and the former the declined, because the probability of error in three narrators is less than in five.

Does numerical elevation automatically make the lofty chain more authentic than the declined one? The answer is: not necessarily. That smaller group of transmitters may contain weak narrators, whereas the larger chain may consist of reliable and firmly established transmitters. Therefore, mere numerical elevation does not in itself guarantee that the lofty chain is the sounder, for assessing the condition