Method of Detecting a Break

A break in the chain, or the dropping of a transmitter, is discovered by establishing that the narrator and the person from whom he supposedly received the report never met—either because they were not contemporaries, or because they never actually came together, or because the narrator never received an ijazah (formal authorisation) from him. This is verified through ʿilm al-tārīkh (the science of historical chronology), which records the birth and death dates of the transmitters and pinpoints the periods in which they studied and travelled in search of knowledge.

For this reason, ʿilm al-tārīkh became a fundamental and indispensable discipline for the hadith scholars.

The Mudallas

Among the sub-types of the munqaṭiʿ is the mudallas (with a ḍammah on the mīm and a doubled lām). The practice itself is called tadlīs, and the one who engages in it is termed a mudallīs (with a kasrah on the lām).

Technical Definition of Tadlīs

Its form is that a narrator omits the name of the teacher from whom he actually heard the report and instead relates from someone higher in the chain, using wording that implies direct hearing without explicitly stating it—for instance, by saying, “ʿan so-and-so.”