Dirayat al-hadith: Difference between revisions

The classification of hadith-related disciplines into fiqh al-hadith (understanding hadiths), ilm al-rijal, and diraya al-hadith is a recent classification that has come to be widely accepted and known. Though this has been an attempt to improve upon the extant classifications of the disciplines of hadith, there are reservations about its applicability to, and inclusiveness of, all disciplines of hadiths as they are conceived by early scholars. Notwithstanding this, there is no doubt that Shiite scholars have long been attentive to the distinction between issues of diraya al-hadith and ilm al-rijal. In addition to ilm al-rijal and diraya al-hadith, another hadith-related discipline has also been mentioned as "ʾilm al-asnād", and the former two have sporadically been taken to be its sub-disciplines, though they take them all to be independent of one another.

===The separation between diraya al-hadith and ilm al-rijal for Shiite scholars===

It is obvious that for Shiite scholars, unlike Sunni scholars, diraya al-hadith and ʾilm al-rijal are not identical; they are completely independent. Thus Shiite scholars did not take ʾilm al-rijal to be part of diraya al-hadith and took discussions about the chains of narrators of hadiths in ʾilm al-rijal and diraya al-ahdith to be of totally different characters: in the latter, the general principles governing such chains are discussed, and in the former, individual instances of the narrators are considered as to, say, whether they are reliable or not. In practice, however, since diraya al-hadith draws upon the results of ʾilm al-rijal, it is common for some issues of ʾilm al-rijal to be discussed in diraya al-hadith, such as [[al-jarh wa al-ta'dil]] (that is, taking a narrator as reliable or unreliable), introduction of trustworthy books of ʾilm al-rijal, and contradictions in reports about a narrator of hadiths.