مصطلح الحديث
Muṣṭalaḥ al-Ḥadīth
Topic
The science that studies the method by which hadith are examined, graded and accepted or rejected.
What it means
Muṣṭalaḥ al-ḥadīth means the technical terminology of hadith. It is the discipline that sets out how a report from the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) is examined: the soundness of its chain of narrators, the reliability of each narrator, and the text itself. From these checks scholars grade a report as sound (ṣaḥīḥ), good (ḥasan) or weak (ḍaʿīf). Hadith scholars developed this method over the early centuries of Islam, and it gave Muslims a way to separate reports that can be relied on from those that cannot. Students of hadith learn it before they use the large collections, since it explains why a collector accepted one report and set another aside.
Often misunderstood as
That hadith were accepted without any scrutiny, when a developed method governed what counted as sound.
What the sources say
The discipline is also called ʿulūm al-ḥadīth, the sciences of hadith. It draws on related fields, including the study of the narrators themselves (rijāl) and of reports that cancel one another (nāsikh and mansūkh).
Term and Arabic as listed in Ismail al Faruqi, Toward Islamic English (International Institute of Islamic Thought, 1995), p. 50, listed as MUṢṬALAḤ AL ḤADĪTH. The definition is restated here.