The transmitters
group · 2 works · 2 mentions · 3 anchored passages
the transmitters · al-nāqilūn · the trustworthy · those who preserved it · الثقات · الحفاظ · الرواة · الناقلين
in the texts
Ansāb al-ʻArab al-qudamāʼ
The Arab bearers of oral report, whose standards of verification, borrowed from hadith criticism, the author invokes as the warrant for genealogical tradition.
If such is the case with the ancient legends of the Arabs, what then of their reports set down in books, upon which the genealogists of the first age of Islam were agreed — the transmitters of that day accepting no narration until it had been verified by a sound chain of authority, from their habit of verifying the Prophetic traditions and the like of the religious reports in that age?
and since totemism is built upon mother-right, he betook himself to establishing the latter, and produced weak proofs with which he passed the bounds of forced construction, and cited rarities from the reports of the Arabs that make the anomalous a rule, and left aside the established general rules upon which the genealogists and the transmitters are agreed — all of which is contrary to the principles of inquiry.
But the existence of this disagreement does not indicate the corruption of descent from its foundation, just as the disagreement of transmitters over the details of one historical event does not indicate that it did not take place.
Risālat al-Wāridāt
The transmitters of doctrine, whose reports of al-Ashʻarī's position ʻAbduh finds irreconcilable and overgrown with dispute, so that no reliable text of the doctrine can be had and only its best-known form can be discussed.
Rather, whenever they transmit a report they multiply talk and counter-talk about it, and they differ over the understanding of its meaning.