Signs & Miracles · Before You Begin

Where these reports come from

Handle with care. Do not claim every miracle report is mass-transmitted. Most are not. Say the grading you actually know, or say you do not know it.

In short

• 1.Every report has a chain (isnad) — a named list of who heard it from whom, back to an eyewitness.
• 2.Scholars wrote biographies of those narrators: honest or careless, met or never met, memory strong or failing.
• 3.A report carried by many independent groups is called mutawatir — the strongest class there is.
• 4.So the question is never 'does it sound amazing?' It is 'who saw it, and can the chain be checked?'

The claim being examined

Muslims do not accept a miracle story because it is inspiring. They accept it because of who narrated it, to whom, and whether the chain holds.

The Islamic position

The strongest signs are those reported by groups of witnesses through several independent chains, recorded in the most rigorous collections and graded sahih.

Analysis

Hadith criticism grades reports as sahih (sound), hasan (good), da'if (weak) or mawdu' (fabricated) on the basis of the continuity of the chain, the integrity and precision of each narrator, and the absence of irregularity or hidden defect. Bukhari and Muslim applied the strictest conditions. The signs used in this section are drawn from those collections wherever possible, and where a report sits below that level it is labelled so the user can say the grading out loud.

From the Sunnah

Sources

Ibn al-Salah, Muqaddimah fi 'Ulum al-Hadith · Al-Nawawi, Sharh Sahih Muslim · Introduction to Sahih Muslim

More in Before You Begin

• What a sign is actually for
• What a miracle can and cannot prove