Dirayat al-hadith: Difference between revisions

It is obvious that for [[Shi'a|Shiite]] scholars, unlike [[Sunni]] scholars, dirayat al-hadith and the [[science of rijal]] are not identical; they are completely independent. Thus Shiite scholars did not take the science of rijal to be part of dirayat al-hadith and took discussions about the chains of narrators of hadiths in the science of rijal and dirayat 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 dirayat al-hadith draws upon the results of the science of rijal, it is common for some issues of the science of rijal to be discussed in dirayat al-hadith, such as [[al-jarh wa al-ta'dil]] (that is, taking a narrator as reliable or unreliable), introduction of trustworthy books of the science of rijal, and contradictions in reports about a narrator of hadiths.

The discipline has also been called "'ulum al-hadith" (sciences of hadith), "mustalah al-hadith" (terminologies of hadith), and "usul al-hadith" (principles of hadith). Among [[Shiite]] scholars, however, the term "diraya al-hadith", or sometimes "diraya" for short, is most commonly used. And for Shiite scholars, the term, "usul al-hadith", has come to refer to the main books of hadith, such as [[al-kutub al-arbaʾa]] (the four books).