The methods of receiving ḥadīth are eight in number:
Samāʿ and qirāʾa are permitted by consensus. Ijāza is disputed, with Abū Ṭāhir al-Dabbās rejecting it.
Permission to transmit is required in munāwala, though not in mukātaba according to some. The majority require permission to transmit in waṣiyya and iʿlām as well, in contrast to a minority view.1
Sharḥ al-Nukhba, p. 66; Qafw al-Athar, pp. 82–83; al-Muḥarrar, 1/267–268. ↩
Whether a mubtadiʿ's innovation amounts to outright disbelief or proceeds from misinterpretation, and how the imāms differ on accepting his narration.
When a narrator's solitary transmission is suspected, others' parallel narrations are mutābaʿa or shāhid; the pursuit of these is al-iʿtibār.
A ḥadīth in which a narrator has been replaced with another, whether one narrator, several, or even the entire chain, is al-maqlūb (literally, that which has been inverted).
Positions on what to do when the teacher (aṣl) denies a narration that the student (farʿ) attributes to him.
