al-Haja ila Marifat Ilm al-Jarh wa al-Tadil - ضمن «Athar al-Muallimi»
- Author died
- 1386 AH
- Editions
- Dār ʿĀlam al-Fawāʾid lil-Nashr wa-al-Tawzīʿ
al-Haja ila Marifat Ilm al-Jarh wa al-Tadil (The Need to Know the Science of Transmitter Criticism and Endorsement) is a concise treatise on hadith criticism by the Yemeni scholar Abd al-Rahman al-Mu'allimi al-Yamani (d. 1386 AH / 1966 CE) .
Background and Manuscript
The treatise was not given a formal title by al-Mu'allimi; its descriptive title was assigned by the editor based on its central theme: demonstrating the essential necessity of mastering transmitter criticism (al-jarḥ wa-al-taʿdīl) for anyone undertaking independent scholarly evaluation (ijtihād) of hadith .
The work survived in a single manuscript preserved in the Library of the Haram al-Makki within a collective volume (no. 4693) . This draft consists of two large folio pages (40a–40b) written in pencil, displaying numerous strike-throughs, insertions, and marginal notes . It was subsequently edited and published spanning eight pages as part of the fifteenth volume of al-Mu'allimi's collected works (Āthār al-Muʿallimī) .
Contents and Arguments
Al-Mu'allimi opens the treatise with the theological premise that God created humanity to worship and obey Him, as stated in the verse: وَمَا خَلَقْتُ الْجِنَّ وَالْإِنْسَ إِلَّا لِيَعْبُدُونِ ("And I did not create the jinn and mankind except to worship Me") . Because obedience depends on adhering to the final revelation brought by the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, God undertook the preservation of the religion—including the Sunnah, which elucidates the Quran—by raising reliable transmitters and critical scholars across generations .
Al-Mu'allimi challenges the presumption of those who claim that the necessity of discerning authentic from fabricated narrations has ended, categorizing proponents of this view into different groups and engaging them in debate:
- The second group: Those who maintain that distinguishing authentic narrations from weak ones is confined entirely to the explicit verdicts of early hadith masters. Al-Mu'allimi responds that earlier critics were not infallible; therefore, when critics differ over a report, or when a narration lacks an explicit ruling from them, researchers must follow the critics' investigative methodology rather than declare the task impossible .
- The third group: Those who believe that assessing narrators must rely strictly on documented evaluations without further analysis. Al-Mu'allimi emphasizes the necessity of investigating the specific terminological usage and criteria of each critic, as individual authorities differed in their application of terms such as thiqah (trustworthy) or ḍaʿīf (weak) .
Al-Mu'allimi concludes the treatise by establishing two fundamental requirements for scholars of hadith:
- Investigating disputed matters of narrator evaluation by determining the precise conventions and terminological standards of each individual critic .
- Understanding the underlying methods that early critics followed to appraise narrators and actively emulating those methods .
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