Process Tracing of the Fourfold Division of Hadiths and its Validation in the School of Ḥilah

Losing its evidence over time, the view of Shaykh Mufīd and Sayyid Murtaḍā (unauthenticity of isolated tradition (al-khabar al-wāḥid)) proved to be inefficient, and therefore ‘Allāmah Ḥilī proposed the theory of the authenticity of isolated tradition and thus, made the examination of the chain of transmission and consideration of the attributes of narrators matter more than before. This provided the basis for the transformation of the two-fold division of hadith (authentic and weak) to the four-fold division (authentic, good, reliable and weak). Of course, in the viewpoint of ‘Allāmah Ḥilī and the first generations of the school of Ḥilah, evaluating the chain of transmission was not the only criterion for confirming narrations, and they were not indifferent to the evidence; therefore, sometimes they considered inauthentic traditions as authentic and acted according to them if they happened to have some features. The last generation of the school of Ḥilah, however, by leaving aside the evidence, chose the authenticity of the chain of transmission as the only criterion for accepting narrations, and unlike the former generations, they considered authentic hadiths to be limited to the authentic narrations and even insisted on accepting the highest authentic narrations (khabar ṣaḥīḥ a‘lā'ī). On the one hand, this extreme approach caused the emergence of the Akhbārīs and the isolation of the jurisprudence model of Muḥaqqiq Ardabīlī among the mujtahids after him, and on the other hand, it caused many rulings to be unsupported and, as a result, the principle (principle of non-existence (aṣl ‘adam)) to be more frequently used in issuing fatwas.In this article, we deal with the strictness of the followers of the school of Ḥilah in accepting the traditions and its effects.