Shaykh Muḥammad Abū Shuhba gives the same order in his al-Wasīṭ fī ʿUlūm wa-Muṣṭalaḥ al-Ḥadīth (ʿĀlam al-Maʿrifa edition), p. 453, quoting Ḥāfiẓ Ibn Ḥajar's Nukhba with its commentary: "So what has the appearance of contradiction comes to fall in this order: (1) reconciliation, if it is possible; (2) then consideration of the abrogating and the abrogated; (3) then preponderance, if it can be determined; (4) then suspension of action on either of the two aḥādīth until its ruling appears and its case becomes clear." «فصار ما ظاهره التعارض واقعًا على هذا الترتيب: (١) الجمع إن أمكن (٢) فاعتبار الناسخ والمنسوخ (٣) فالترجيح إن تعيَّن (٤) ثم التوقف عن العمل بأحد الحديثين حتى يظهر حكمه ويتبين أمره». The quoted passage adds that tawaqquf is a better expression than tasāquṭ, the word commonly used of two proofs that cancel one another, since the failure to see which of the two preponderates is relative to whoever is examining them at the time, and another may see what was hidden from him. Abū Shuhba adds that tasāquṭ is in any case not a fitting expression to use of the evidence of the sharīʿah. The reasoning behind the order is set out at p. 446: where reconciliation is not possible, one turns to the earlier and the later, and where these are not known, to preponderance. [tr.] ↩
What is meant here is naskh ijtihādī (abrogation reached by independent reasoning), not naskh ṣarīḥī (abrogation explicitly stated in a text). See: Dirāsāt fī Uṣūl al-Ḥadīth ʿalā Manhaj al-Ḥanafiyya, p. 570. ↩
Dirāsāt fī Uṣūl al-Ḥadīth ʿalā Manhaj al-Ḥanafiyya, p. 575; Uṣūl al-Jaṣṣāṣ, 2/41 to 46. ↩
Dirāsāt fī Uṣūl al-Ḥadīth ʿalā Manhaj al-Ḥanafiyya, pp. 567 to 574. Shaykh ʿAbd al-ʿAẓīm al-Balyāwī observes that this ordering is not always tenable; reconciliation is sometimes simply not possible, so it cannot stand as a uniform principle. ↩
Positions on what to do when the teacher (aṣl) denies a narration that the student (farʿ) attributes to him.
If the narrators of a ḥadīth agree in their wording of transmission, in any verbal feature, in an action or in some shared quality, this is al-musalsal (a chained or serial ḥadīth).
Four positions on whether jarḥ and taʿdīl follow the rules of khabar or of testimony, with the additional requirement that the evaluator be ʿadl and unbiased.
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
