stipulate any number of conditions for ijtihād, yet themselves overlook—or remain unaware of—this fundamental condition for it.
Nor are they absolved of responsibility merely because a great many writers today follow this practice, including some who claim affiliation with hadith scholarship. Namely, they cite a hadith in a book’s footnotes and attribute it to one of the books of the Sunnah without stating whether it is sound or weak, even by quoting one of the leading authorities, imagining that they have thereby fulfilled their duty of critical verification! In my view, the truth is that this practice is of no real benefit whatsoever. Indeed, it is closer to deceiving and misleading readers than to advising and benefiting them, even if that is not their intention. This applies especially to those who engage in such extensive source citation that they fill several lines with it—a task made easy by the scholarly indexes compiled in the present age.
Although this growing practice of source citation is a promising sign insofar as it indicates that writers today are taking an interest in hadith scholarship and its literature, that is not enough. Rather, it may create an impression of soundness that they did not intend. This is because ordinary readers do not distinguish between tracing a hadith to its sources and critically assessing it. They therefore assume that merely attributing it to one of the leading hadith scholars means that it is sound, although the two are only rarely connected. Those readers who do understand the distinction gain virtually nothing from source citation alone—except, of course, those capable of undertaking the critical assessment themselves. For them, it facilitates consulting the cited source of the hadith so that they may ascertain whether it is sound or weak. Yet such readers are exceedingly rare. Indeed, it may be said without the slightest doubt that their proportion among readers is far smaller than the proportion of those who have memorized the entire Quran among Muslims generally! Thus, for ordinary readers, this benefit is scarcely worth mentioning.
Consequently, readers who understand the aforementioned distinction will remain bewildered when confronted with mere source citations, unable to tell whether the hadith is sound or weak. That is, unless they incline to assume its soundness despite knowing the distinction just mentioned. They are led to do so by their favorable opinion of the author and his learning, especially if he holds advanced academic degrees and enjoys widespread renown. They fail to realize that even if his degree were in hadith studies itself, this would not necessarily have made him an expert in grading hadiths as sound or weak, assessing narrators, critically examining chains of transmission and texts, and identifying defects—especially hidden ones. No; for that requires, in addition to