Statements attributed to the Prophet ﷺ were verified and investigated as early as the time of the ṣaḥābah.1
Verification of the Sunnah began in the era of the senior ṣaḥābah. ʿAllāmah al-Ḥākim,2 in Maʿrifat ʿUlūm al-Ḥadīth (p. 52), said: "Abū Bakr, ʿUmar, ʿAlī, Zayd ibn Thābit and others, they critiqued and accredited narrators, and investigated the soundness and defectiveness of narrations." End of quotation.
In the beginning this was very little, but then it increased gradually. There are two reasons for this:
First: the strong memory of the mutaqaddimūn, the soundness of their hearts and the prevalence of truthfulness among them compared with those who came after. ʿAllāmah al-Dhahabī3 in his treatise Dhikr Man Yuʿtamadu Qawluhu fī al-Jarḥ wa al-Taʿdīl4 said: "Most of those who are followed are ṣaḥābah, who are upright.
"Most of those followed who are not ṣaḥābah are likewise upright; in fact, most are trustworthy (thiqah) and truthful, retaining what they narrate, and they are the kibār al-tābiʿūn.5 Among them one finds, here and there, an individual about whom there is some criticism. Then, at the beginning of the second century, there was a group of weak narrators among the awsāṭ al-tābiʿūn6 and the ṣighār,7 spoken against on account of their memory or for an innovation in them.8 Then, when the generality of the tābiʿūn had passed away, around 150 AH, a group of the expert critics spoke on declaring narrators trustworthy and weak." End of quotation.
The second reason: their chains of transmission were shorter than those who came after them. ʿAllāmah al-ʿIrāqī said: "There is no doubt that a great body of the ḥuffāẓ of the mutaqaddimūn had as their teachers tābiʿūn or atbāʿ al-tābiʿūn,9 and as the teachers of their teachers ṣaḥābah or tābiʿūn. So matters in that era were simpler."10
Note that in the first century there was not the same concern for memorising, writing down and compiling ḥadīth as in the generations that followed. That era was the era of the spread of Islam: the early Muslims went out across the world calling people to Islam and inviting them to it, and they were occupied with jihād in the path of Allāh. During their travels and at home, in their mosques and houses, they would learn the Qurʾān and the Sunnah, discuss the lawful and the unlawful and hear the aḥādīth and the āthār, then act upon them and call others to them. This was their constant practice, and by the blessing of their perseverance in it they became the best of people at retaining knowledge. They were aided in this by the shortness of their isnāds, as already mentioned, by hearts that were pure, retentive and strong, and by motives and intentions that were sound because of the completeness of their faith. So they did not need to write down and compile ḥadīth as later generations were obliged to do.
The codification of ḥadīth then began at the command of ʿUmar ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz at the start of the second century. The second century was thus the era of the codification of ḥadīth, and verification (taḥqīq) of ḥadīth increased within it, as already noted in al-Dhahabī's words. Verification of ḥadīth reached its peak in the third century, which became the era of taḥqīq al-ḥadīth. Most of the verifiers in this discipline lived in that era, among them:
Al-Dhahabī, in his treatise Dhikr Man Yuʿtamadu Qawluhu fī al-Jarḥ wa al-Taʿdīl, mentions seven hundred and fifteen persons from the beginning down to his own time (the eighth century), of whom about three hundred lived most of their lives in the third century.14
Within the same work, at the end of the fifth ṭabaqah (the generation of al-Bukhārī and Muslim), he says: "And there is a great multitude whose names do not come to my mind. It would happen, in the course of journeying for the sake of knowledge, that two hundred or three hundred of them would gather in a single town; the least learned among them would be like the most retentive of our own age." End of quotation.15
Verification of ḥadīth continued into the fourth century, which produced Ibn Ḥibbān, al-Dāraquṭnī, Ibn Manda, al-Ḥākim, Abū Nuʿaym and others, and into the fifth century, which produced Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr, al-Khaṭīb, al-Bayhaqī, Ibn al-Qaṭṭān, Ibn Ḥazm and others.
Even so, this was very little compared to what had come before. The focus of the mutaʾakhkhirūn's verification became the verification carried out by the mutaqaddimūn, that is, those of the third century and before. For this reason they needed to know the statements and technical terms of those earlier scholars, and so works on the technical terminology of the people of ḥadīth began to be composed in the fourth century.
For more information, see the Muqaddima to the Ṣaḥīḥ of Imām Muslim. [tr.] ↩
Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd Allāh al-Naysābūrī (321 to 405 AH), author of al-Mustadrak ʿalā al-Ṣaḥīḥayn and Maʿrifat ʿUlūm al-Ḥadīth. [tr.] ↩
Shams al-Dīn Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad al-Dhahabī (673 to 748 AH), author of the celebrated Siyar Aʿlām al-Nubalāʾ and Mīzān al-Iʿtidāl fī Naqd al-Rijāl. [tr.] ↩
Dhikr Man Yuʿtamadu Qawluhu fī al-Jarḥ wa al-Taʿdīl is a short treatise of ʿAllāmah al-Dhahabī's on the critics themselves rather than on the narrators they judged. It opens by dividing those whose word in jarḥ and taʿdīl is accepted into three classes by the reach of their criticism (those who spoke on most narrators, such as Ibn Maʿīn and Abū Ḥātim al-Rāzī; those who spoke on many, such as Mālik and Shuʿbah; and those who spoke on one man after another, such as Ibn ʿUyayna and al-Shāfiʿī), and then into three by temper: the severe, the lenient and the balanced. The rest of it is a roll of seven hundred and fifteen numbered critics, from al-Shaʿbī down to al-Dhahabī's own teachers, the body of them set out in twenty-two ṭabaqāt. It is printed within Arbaʿ Rasāʾil fī ʿUlūm al-Ḥadīth, edited by Shaykh ʿAbd al-Fattāḥ Abū Ghuddah (Dār al-Bashāʾir, fourth edition, 1410/1990), pp. 171 to 227, with the editor's introduction at pp. 153 to 167; the passage quoted here is at pp. 173 to 175. Shaykh ʿAbd al-Fattāḥ Abū Ghuddah notes (p. 165) that the ṭabaqāt are numbered sequentially only, so that the first ṭabaqah of this treatise answers to the fifth in the usual reckoning. [tr.] ↩
Senior tābiʿūn: those who met the Companions and died in a state of faith. [tr.] ↩
Tābiʿūn of the middle generation. [tr.] ↩
Junior tābiʿūn. [tr.] ↩
The author's quotation begins partway through ʿAllāmah al-Dhahabī's explanation of why the weak were few in the earliest period (Dhikr Man Yuʿtamadu Qawluhu fī al-Jarḥ wa al-Taʿdīl, p. 173 of Shaykh Abū Ghuddah's edition). At pp. 174 to 175 he goes on to name the weak narrators of the early second century, in a clause the quotation leaves out: ʿAṭiyya al-ʿAwfī (d. 111 AH), Farqad al-Sabakhī (d. 131 AH), Jābir al-Juʿfī (d. 167 AH) and Abū Hārūn al-ʿAbdī (d. 134 AH). Whether a tābiʿī against whom no jarḥ is recorded may be presumed upright is a related question, and ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Muʿallimī rejects the presumption on two grounds: the ḥadīth in praise of the first generations may be speaking of proportions, and a bare majority cannot ground a judgement about a particular narrator whose state is unknown (al-Istibṣār fī Naqd al-Akhbār, ed. Sīdī Muḥammad al-Shinqīṭī, Dār Aṭlas, 1417 AH, pp. 32 to 33). [tr.] ↩
Literally, the followers of the followers: those who met the tābiʿūn and died in a state of faith. [tr.] ↩
ʿAllāmah al-ʿIrāqī said this in answer to a question put to him by his student Ḥāfiẓ Ibn Ḥajar, on what may be required of a man in a later age before he is called a ḥāfiẓ. The answer is quoted by al-Suyūṭī in Tadrīb al-Rāwī (ed. Muḥammad ʿAwwāma, Dār al-Yusr and Dār al-Minhāj, first edition, 1437/2016), 2/61, and by al-Sakhāwī in al-Jawāhir wa al-Durar (ed. Ibrāhīm Bājis, Dār Ibn Ḥazm, 1419/1999), 1/83. Both continue "in view of how late the age had grown" «باعتبار تأخُّر الزمان», which the author does not quote. Shaykh Muḥammad ʿAwwāma notes that this was the fifth of six questions Ibn Ḥajar put to al-ʿIrāqī, printed as Ajwibat al-Ḥāfiẓ al-ʿIrāqī ʿalā Asʾilat Tilmīdhihi al-Ḥāfiẓ Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī, pp. 137 to 144. [tr.] ↩
ʿAlī ibn al-Madīnī (161 to 234 AH) was one of the teachers of Imām al-Bukhārī. Shaykh ʿAbd al-Fattāḥ Abū Ghuddah writes in his Lamaḥāt min Tārīkh al-Sunnah wa-ʿUlūm al-Ḥadīth (p. 201) that ʿAlī ibn al-Madīnī was the first to compose an independent work on ʿulūm al-ḥadīth. [tr.] ↩
This is Abū Muḥammad ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Dārimī al-Samarqandī, the author of the Sunan, and not ʿUthmān ibn Saʿīd al-Dārimī (d. 280 AH). The author's own source settles it: ʿAllāmah al-Dhahabī's Dhikr Man Yuʿtamadu Qawluhu fī al-Jarḥ wa al-Taʿdīl, which he cites on the next page, lists in its fifth ṭabaqah, consecutively, al-Bukhārī, al-Dhuhlī and ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Dārimī, the same cluster of names reproduced here, while ʿUthmān al-Dārimī appears much later in the treatise beside Abū Zurʿa al-Dimashqī. The ascending order of death dates around the name in this list also fits 255 AH rather than 280. [tr.] ↩
The dates follow al-Dhahabī's Siyar Aʿlām al-Nubalāʾ, supplemented from al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī's Tārīkh Baghdād, al-Mizzī's Tahdhīb al-Kamāl and Ibn Ḥajar's Tahdhīb al-Tahdhīb. Two of the deaths are disputed, and both years are given for each: Ṣāliḥ Jazara died in Dhū al-Ḥijjah 293 according to ʿAllāmah al-Dhahabī, who records his age as eighty nine, and in 294 according to Ibn al-Munādī and al-Idrīsī; al-Bazzār died in Rabīʿ I 291 according to Ibn Qāniʿ, on his son's authority, and in 292 according to Ibn Yūnus. Al-Ṭaḥāwī's birth is reported variously as 229, 238 and 239, so for him, as for the others whose birth year these sources leave unsettled, the year of death alone is printed. [tr.] ↩
The figure is the number of numbered entries in the treatise. In Shaykh Abū Ghuddah's edition (Dār al-Bashāʾir, fourth edition, 1410/1990) they run from p. 171 to p. 227, where the last of them, no. 715, is al-Ḥāfiẓ Fatḥ al-Dīn Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad ibn Sayyid al-Nās al-Yaʿmurī, after which the treatise closes. [tr.] ↩
These words come at p. 197 of Shaykh Abū Ghuddah's edition, directly after entry 357, al-Ḥārith ibn Abī Usāma, the last name of the fifth ṭabaqah, which opens at p. 192 with al-Bukhārī. [tr.] ↩
A survey of the foundational works on ḥadīth terminology from al-Rāmahurmuzī to Ibn al-Ḥanbalī's Qafw al-Athar, and the author's reasons for composing al-Mulakhkhaṣ
The front matter of al-Mulakhkhaṣ: the preface to the second edition, the commendation and endorsement from Maẓāhir ʿUlūm and the author's foreword
Al-mursal in its broad sense was not rejected by anyone until Imām al-Shāfiʿī; the Ḥanafīs differ over the mursal of the first three generations.
Al-shādhdh is what a single narrator transmits alone, raising doubt in the mind of the critic; this is also al-munkar, and the muḥaddithūn treat the two as one.
