(p. 525), and to judge weak a chain whose apparent soundness suggests authenticity, because his examination of its various routes has uncovered a hidden defect that undermines it, such as a mursal transmission, a break in the chain, concealment in transmission, or the like. He would not have discovered this had he not examined the various routes. This matter is discussed in the science of hadith methodology; consult, if you wish, al-Ba'ith al-Hathith, under “Hadiths with Hidden Defects” (pp. 68–77), or another work. By Allah’s grace, we have possessed knowledge of this, both in theory and in practice, for nearly half a century. My books are the greatest testimony to that, especially Irwa al-Ghalil, this series, and the other series. Examples abound in both of them. There is no harm in pointing to some of those that will come in this volume: hadith nos. 1502, 1513, 1528, 1542, and 1566; and pp. 102, 143, 158, 176, 190, 202, 204, 215, 242, 243, 291, 299, 302, 314, 324, 330, 352, 355, 367, 381, 403, 404, 411, 424, 449, 466, 486, 541, 564, 568, 572, 618, 641, and 648.
B. As for contemporary scholars who differ with me, I attach no appreciable weight to their disagreement, because most of them have no mastery of this discipline beyond mere transmission and filling footnotes with references to hadiths and attributing them to certain printed hadith compilations, relying for this on the indexes prepared for those works, both old and new. This is of little substantial benefit, as I explained in the introduction to my book Ghayat al-Maram fi Takhrij Ahadith al-Halal wa al-Haram (The Ultimate Aim in Tracing the Hadiths on the Lawful and the Forbidden) (p. 4). Indeed, I consider this sort of source-documentation to involve a degree of—albeit certainly unintended—misleading of many readers, who infer merely from a hadith’s attribution to an imam that the hadith is established. Their mistaken impression of its authenticity grows when its documentation is accompanied by the statement that its narrators are trustworthy, or that its narrators are the narrators of