ther the person who has been omitted is reliable or not, for a Successor may narrate from another Successor, and among the Successors there are both trustworthy transmitters and those who are not.

According to Abū Ḥanīfah and Mālik, a mursal report is accepted without reservation. They contend that the Successor would only omit the intermediary because he was fully confident in and reliant upon the report’s authenticity; the entire issue, they say, concerns reliability, and had the report not been sound in his estimation he would neither have sent it forth nor declared, “The Messenger of Allah ﷺ said….”

Al-Shāfiʿī, on the other hand, accepts the mursal only when it is supported by another line of transmission—whether another mursal or a musnad—even if that corroborating report is weak. From Aḥmad two positions are transmitted.

All of this holds when it is known that the Successor in question does not transmit in mursal form except from trustworthy narrators. If, however, his custom is to transmit mursal reports from both trustworthy individuals and those who are not