of recognised truthfulness. Accordingly, if we later come across another scholar who has disparaged any one of them, that disparagement stands opposite the endorsement of this leading Imām and will not be accepted unless the critic specifies the reason and explains it with a concrete flaw—one that compromises the narrator’s probity, his overall precision, or his precision in a particular report. The factors that prompt a ruling of discredit are of varying weight: some undermine reliability, while others do not.

He went on to list the five main causes around which discredit revolves: (1) innovation, (2) contradiction, (3) error, (4) obscurity of status, and (5) the claim of a break in the chain. He discussed each of these in general terms with respect to the transmitters of the Ṣaḥīḥ, and then drew attention to certain points for which some scholars had faulted narrators—points that in fact do not invalidate them.

Al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī said, as cited in al-Qāsimī’s Qawāʿid al-Taḥdīth: “Whenever al-Bukhārī and Muslim rely upon a group of narrators against whom others have levelled criticism, that reliance is to be understood as showing that no substantiated, consequential criticism—clearly explained as to its cause—has been established against them….”

Al-Ḥāfiẓ al-Dhahabī, in a short treatise he compiled on trustworthy narrators who have been spoken of in ways that do not warrant their rejection, stated: “In my work al-Mīzān I have recorded a great many reliable transmitters upon whom al-Bukhārī, Muslim and others relied, for the single reason that each man’s name appears in the books of impugnment. I did not list them because I considered them weak; rather, I did so for the sake of documentation. Time and again a sound narrator comes before me, and there is a remark about him from someone whose opinion carries no weight…,” and so forth—may Allah have mercy on him.