Rethinking the Description of a Hadīth Scholar

By Tāj al-Dīn al-Subkī  

[Translators note: The purpose of the following translation is not to present a precise definition of a Hadīth scholar. Rather, it is hoped that the following excerpt will shed light on the hollowness of the claim that expertise in the sciences of Hadīth, e.g. independent Hadīth grading and narrator criticism, is a simple task achievable even by students who studied a few primers in the field.] 

Tāj al-Dīn al-Subkī (d. 771) writes: 

There is a group of people who claim proficiency in the science of Hadīth; the peak of their study is a glance in Mashāriq al-Anwār of al-Sāghānī. And if they are overconfident, they advance to al-Masābīh of al-Baghawī, laboring under the impression that this amount will suffice to reach the rank of the Hadīth scholars. This is due to their sheer ignorance of the science of Hadīth. If the aforementioned people commit these two works to memory and add to them similar [Hadīth] texts, they will not become Hadīth scholars; they will not become Hadīth scholars by virtue of this until a camel enters through the eye of a needle. 

If they aspire to acquire the height of mastery in Hadīth, based on their assumption, they engage in [the study of] Jāmi‘ al-‘Usūl of Ibn al-Athīr. If they add to it ‘Ulūm al-Hadīth of Ibn al-Salāh or its abridgment entitled al-Taqrīb wa al-Taysīr of al-Nawawī, etc., then the one who reaches this stage is proclaimed “the Muhaddith of the Muhaddithūn” and “the Bukhārī of the time” among other false titles. For indeed, those who we mentioned are not regarded as Hadīth scholars with this amount. 

A Hadīth scholar is only he who is well acquainted with the chains of transmission, hidden flaws [in Hadīth], the names of narrators, and the elevated (al-‘ālī) and the descending (al-nāzīl) [chains]; he memorized over and above that an abundant amount of [Hadīth] texts; and he listened [under a teacher] to the six canonical books, the Musnad of Ahmad ibn Hanbal, the Sunan of al-Bayhaqī, the Mu‘jam of al-Tabarānī in addition to one thousand Hadīth treatises. This is the lowest of their ranks! When he studies all that we mentioned and he compiles Hadīth collections (al-tibāq), frequents the Shuyūkh, and he discusses the hidden flaws [in Hadīth], the dates of death, and the chains of transmission, he will reach the first rank of the Hadīth scholars. Thereafter, Allāh increases whosoever He will as He wills. 

[Al-Subkī, Mu‘īd al-Ni‘am wa Mubīd al-Niqam (1996), Cairo: Maktabat al-Khānijī, ed. al-Najjār et al., pp.81-83; also see: al-Suyūtī, Tadrīb al-Rāwī (1431), Beirut: Dār Ibn al-Jawzī, ed. Māzin al-Sarsāwī, vol.1, pp.80-81.]