Others maintained that the prohibition on wearing circular gold jewellery is shādh (anomalous) and therefore not to be acted upon, because it conflicts with what is established in the two Ṣaḥīḥs and elsewhere concerning its permissibility. This was the view adopted by our teacher, ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz b. ʿAbd Allāh b. Bāz.
A third group said that the reports containing the prohibition belong to the earliest phase, when people were in straitened circumstances, and that a later concession lifted the ban.
I have cited these three examples simply to show that shudhūdh (anomaly) need not be confined to a single ḥadīth; it may affect one report, two, or even more.
We now know what counts as shādh and what stands opposite to it. There is, however, another type of discrepancy the author did not mention: when the narrator who diverges is unreliable, his report is called munkar.
The munkar is a report in which a weak narrator contradicts a reliable one, and it is worse than the shādh, for the munkar combines contradiction with weakness, whereas the shādh involves contradiction from a trustworthy narrator.
The opposite of the munkar is the maʿrūf. Thus the categories are four:
- maḥfūẓ (preserved)
- shādh (anomalous)
- munkar (denounced)
- maʿrūf (known)
The shādh is that which a trustworthy narrator relates in contradiction to someone more authoritative than himself.
The munkar is that which a weak narrator relates in contradiction to a reliable one.
The maḥfūẓ, which counters the shādh, is what the more authoritative narrator relates in opposition to one of lesser reliability.
The maʿrūf is what the trustworthy narrator relates in opposition to the weak narrator.