Tawaatur: Difference between revisions

Tawaatur (تواتر) is a concept that seeks to classify hadith traditions into more or less reliable categories based on the multiplicity of attestation traditions standing behind them. Tawaatur means "succession" and in the "science" of hadiths (so called due to its Arabic designation, علم الحديث, "'ilm al-hadith", where "'ilm" meaning "knowledge" is also used in Arabic to mean "science" (compare Latin "scienta", "knowledge", source of the English word "science") it means that there is a lot of isnaads (chains of narrators of an oral tradition). When a hadith has a lot of chains, the hadith is then called "mutawaatir" (متواتر). The mutawaatir hadiths are distinguished from hadiths that are called ahaad (آحاد) which have a "small" number of chains (although ahad literally means "singular" <ref>https://www.almaany.com/en/dict/ar-en/%d8%a2%d8%ad%d8%a7%d8%af</ref>).