The concealed report (mudallas) and the hidden loose attribution (mursal khafi)

In [[work/nuzhat-al-nazar|Nuzhat al-Nazar]], Ibn Hajar explains that a drop in the chain may be evident, recognisable by anyone, as when the narrator was not a contemporary of the one he cites, or hidden, detectable only by expert imams versed in the routes of hadith and the defects of chains. An evident drop is known from the narrator and his teacher never having met: he did not live in his time, or did but they never met, and he had neither licence (ijaza) nor a found text (wijada) from him. Hence the need for history, which records narrators' births, deaths and times of study and travel; by it people who claimed to have heard from teachers have been exposed. ²

The first hidden kind is the concealed report (mudallas), so called because the narrator did not name his informant and gave the impression that he had heard the report from someone who had not told it to him; the word comes from dalas, the mingling of darkness, since both involve obscurity. It is transmitted in a form that allows for a meeting, such as "from" or "he said"; if it is in an explicit form admitting no latitude, it is a lie. The ruling on an upright narrator proven to conceal is that, on the soundest view, only reports in which he states explicitly that he heard are accepted from him. ³

The editor's example of concealment in the chain is Abu 'Awana's report from al-A'mash, from Ibrahim al-Taymi, from his father, from Abu Dharr: when Abu 'Awana asked al-A'mash, "Did you hear this from Ibrahim?" he replied, "No, Hakim ibn Jubayr told it me from him." The editor describes a second kind, concealment of teachers: naming a teacher, or using his kunya or a nisba, by something he is not known by, so that he will not be recognised. Scholars censured concealment in all its forms, he says, but did not count it as impugning the narrator, since it is an insinuation and not a lie. ⁴

The hidden loose attribution (mursal khafi) is a contemporary transmitting from someone he never met, with a link between them. For Ibn Hajar the difference is fine: concealment applies to one who transmits from someone he is known to have met; if he was only a contemporary and is not known to have met him, it is a hidden loose attribution. Whoever includes mere contemporaneity in the definition of concealment must include the hidden loose attribution in it, and the right course is to keep them apart. ⁵

His evidence that meeting is required is the hadith scholars' consensus that reports from the Prophet ﷺ by those who lived through both eras (mukhadramun), such as Abu 'Uthman al-Nahdi and Qays ibn Abi Hazim, count as loose attribution, not concealment; were contemporaneity enough, they would be concealers. Among those who required a meeting for concealment are al-Shafi'i and Abu Bakr al-Bazzar, and al-Khatib's words in al-Kifaya imply it; this is the accepted view. ⁶

That two never met is known from the narrator's own statement or a knowledgeable imam's firm judgement. It is not enough that some routes add a narrator between them, since this may be an "addition within connected chains"; al-Khatib wrote al-Tafsil li-Mubham al-Marasil and al-Mazid fi Muttasil al-Asanid on the subject. ⁷

See also tadlis in its wider legal sense.