Reasons for the name multiplicity of hadith narrators

In order to benefit from hadiths, as one of the major sources of religious knowledge, it is necessary to know about the biographical and scholastic identities of the narrators of those hadiths. As a matter of fact, investigating the scholastic status of a narrator should be preceded by gaining biographical knowledge about him. To this end, valuable attempts have been made to extract any possible information about hadith narrators and organize it into unified datasets. This can help researchers detect why a given narrator has been mentioned with different names or titles. Through a descriptive-analytical method, this research delves into hadith sources and biographies to detect why a narrator is sometimes referred to with numerous names or titles. As the results of the study show, the main factors in this regard are the deliberate misspelling or mispronunciation of names, disparity of names, differences among biographical and hadith sources, existence of confusable names and titles, brevity of the lists of narrators, conciseness of names, and deliberate multiplication of names.