The mass-transmitted report (mutawatir)

The mutawatir is the first class in Ibn Hajar's division of reports by the number of their chains in Nuzhat al-Nazar: a report with many chains, not confined to a fixed number. ² Ibn Hajar uses the word khabar (report) rather than hadith to be more inclusive, noting that for scholars of the discipline khabar is a synonym of hadith, though some say a hadith is what comes from the Prophet ﷺ and a khabar what comes from others. ³

Ibn Hajar gathers four conditions: ⁴

1. A large number whom custom rules out having agreed or coincided on a lie.
2. That they relate it from others like them from beginning to end, the number never falling at any point.
3. That their final basis is sense perception — something seen or heard — not a matter established by pure reason.
4. That their report yields knowledge in the hearer.

If knowledge does not result, the report is only mashhur: "every mutawatir is mashhur, but not the reverse". ⁴

For Ibn Hajar there is no point, on the sound view, in fixing a number; some fixed it at four, others at five, seven, ten, twelve, forty or seventy, each citing a text in which that number figures, but what holds in one case need not hold in others. ⁵ The editor, Nur al-Din 'Itr, explains that certainty may come from three or four memorisers, while more than ten may be needed of lesser men. ⁶

• The view relied on, for Ibn Hajar, is that the mutawatir yields immediate (daruri) knowledge, which a person cannot resist; he rejects the view that it yields only inferential knowledge, since a common person without the capacity for inference still has it. ⁷
• Certainty, for him, is "firm belief that corresponds to reality". ⁷
• He left the conditions of mass transmission out of the base text because it is not a subject of the science of chains, which examines the soundness or weakness of a report through the qualities of narrators and the forms of transmission, whereas "the narrators of the mutawatir are not examined; it must be acted on without examination". ⁸

Ibn Hajar quotes Ibn al-Salah that an example of the mutawatir is hard to find, unless one claims it for "whoever lies about me"; he answers that this claimed rarity, and others' claim that it does not exist, both come from too little acquaintance with the many chains, and argues that when the famous collections, whose attribution to their authors is certain, agree on a report with chains of that number, it yields certain knowledge of its soundness, and such cases are many. ⁸ The editor gives examples: "whoever lies about me deliberately" from some seventy Companions, the Basin from over fifty, wiping over leather socks from seventy, and "the Qur'an was revealed in seven modes" from twenty-seven. ^{6 8}

The editor divides the mutawatir into verbal, like "whoever lies about me", and thematic, where many relate different incidents sharing one point, such as raising the hands in supplication, on which some hundred reports exist. ⁹ He notes that the Hanafis divide reports into three: mutawatir, mashhur and ahad, the mashhur for them being a report solitary at first that later became mass-transmitted. ⁷

The debate of legal theorists and theologians on what mass transmission yields and on its number has not yet been taken from their own works.