Tawaatur: Difference between revisions

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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>).

*There were thousands of Muslim transmitters available when the hadiths were written; even giving the the most generous assumptions of Muslim honesty, it wouldn't be hard to find 4, 5 or 70+ loose transmitters, liars, or persons willing to affirm a tradition they don't know to be true. Islamic scholars respond by pointing out that hadith scholars did more than just collect isnads, as they also analyzed the reliability of the transmitters. Consequently, it may well be the case that there are descriptions of the prophet that have been correctly transmitted - critical scholars admit that while the general bar of evidence for most hadiths considered authentic cannot be a source of certainty, there may still be some narrations that are reliable. As far as certainty is concerned - that is, ''knowing for a fact that a report is not fabricated or incorrect'' - this degree of certainty remains generally unattainable where empirical evidence is lacking (as a result, where a minted coin is found from the 8th century - determined using scientific methods - we may be relatively sure that this coin was minted at this time in history, but we can't be ''religiously certain'' it was minted by one or another person, and finding written evidence regarding someone's statements may not be sufficient, as there is always a chance that the scribe or report was mistaken, lying, or manipulating facts).

*Most sahih hadiths are not mutawaatir, but they are accepted anyway (because all people in the chain supposedly always tell the truth), which calls the entire framework into question

*If "many" (4, 5... or 70) people who, narrated to the people who narrated to the person who will write the hadiths, made up false chains, the hadith will be called "mutawaatir"

*If "many" (4, 5... or 70) people heard an authentic report from Muhammad, but weren't sure what exactly he said and consulted each other and the most confident of them "assured" them that his version is correct (although it wasn't) and then they narrated it to the people etc.. it will be called "mutawaatir"

*If 70 honest people heard from other honest people who heard from other honest people.. an authentic report from Muhammad and then they narrated it to the person who will write the hadiths, but they knew only the names of the people who told them and didn't know the names of the people who told to the people who told them, then the hadith is unreliable.

And for every qari, there are two rawi's which also often differ, even though they had the same teacher. The most popular version of the Arabic Quran today is the version of Hafs, who was one of the students of Aasim. Since other versions of the Quran differ from Hafs' version, the most popular version of the Quran is ahad. And even if all 10 qari had exactly the same text of the Quran, according to some scholars mutawaatir requires 70 chains, so 60 chains would be missing.