الجرح والتعديل
al-Jarḥ wa-l-Taʿdīl
Topic
The science of assessing hadith narrators: their faults (jarḥ) or their reliability (taʿdīl).
What it means
Jarḥ means wounding, that is, finding fault in a narrator, and taʿdīl means declaring him upright. The science investigates the people who passed on hadith so as to judge whether each is trustworthy or not, looking at their honesty, memory and accuracy. It is a main tool for judging the strength of a chain of transmission. The practice rests on the Quranic instruction to verify news brought by a wrongdoer (49:6). Early critics such as Yahya ibn Maʿin and Ahmad ibn Hanbal gave opinions on thousands of narrators, and Ibn Abi Hatim al-Razi compiled a large work titled al-Jarḥ wa-l-Taʿdīl. The science produced detailed biographical dictionaries of narrators.
Often misunderstood as
Some read it as slander or backbiting, though scholars treated it as a duty of protecting the religion from false reports.
What the sources say
Scholars set rules for the science, including that criticism must be based on knowledge and explained when it is severe, and that it must be done for the sake of the faith and not out of personal dislike.
Term and Arabic as listed in Ismail al Faruqi, Toward Islamic English (International Institute of Islamic Thought, 1995), p. 49, listed as AL JARḤ WAL TA'DĪL. The definition is restated here.