رجال الحديث
Rijāl al-Ḥadīth
Topic
The science that studies the narrators of hadith, in so far as they are narrators.
What it means
Rijāl al-ḥadīth means the men, and women, of hadith: the people through whom reports reached later generations. The science studies their lives and their characters as narrators: when and where they lived, whom they met and from whom they heard, and whether they were honest, accurate and trusted. Scholars collected this information into biographical dictionaries, and the judgments recorded there (jarḥ and taʿdīl, criticism and commendation) are used to assess a chain of narrators. The science treats each narrator only as a narrator, and it is one of the main tools by which a hadith is judged sound or weak.
Often misunderstood as
That hadith scholars accepted reports without checking the people who passed them on.
Term and Arabic as listed in Ismail al Faruqi, Toward Islamic English (International Institute of Islamic Thought, 1995), p. 49, listed as RIJĀL AL ḤADĪTH. The definition is restated here.