The methods of receiving ḥadīth are eight in number:
Samāʿ and qirāʾah are permitted by consensus. Ijāzah is disputed, with Abū Ṭāhir al-Dabbās rejecting it.
Permission to transmit is required in munāwalah, though not in mukātabah, according to the majority. Ḥāfiẓ Ibn Ḥajar and others inclined to the view that permission is not a condition in either case; Ibn Ḥajar said: "No strong distinction between the two has become apparent to me." Wijāda is that one comes upon a writing in a hand whose writer he knows, and says of it: "I found in the hand of so-and-so such-and-such." It is munqaṭiʿ, though it carries a trace of connection, and it is not permissible to use ḥaddathanā or akhbaranā of it unless he holds the teacher's permission to narrate from him. Waṣiyya is that at his death, or on setting out on a journey, he bequeaths to a particular person his aṣl or his uṣūl, the written copies from which he narrates. Iʿlām is that the teacher informs one of his students, saying: "I narrate such-and-such a book from so-and-so." The majority require permission to transmit in waṣiyya and iʿlām as well, in contrast to a minority view.1
Qafw al-Athar, pp. 109 to 111; Sharḥ al-Nukhba, pp. 96 to 101; Muqaddimat Ibn al-Ṣalāḥ, pp. 112 to 118. ↩
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.
Positions on what to do when the teacher (aṣl) denies a narration that the student (farʿ) attributes to him.
The Ḥanafīs classify narrators by ʿadāla, ḍabṭ and fiqh, with the mastūr as a disputed third category and the majhūl, whose narration falls into five cases
