Authority of Narrations (3)

The second verse that is used to validate the usage of this kind of narration, is that in Surah Tawbah, verse 112:

"And it does not beseem the believers that they should go forth all together; why should not then a company from every party from among them go forth that they may apply themselves to obtain understanding in religion, and that they may warn their people when they come back to them that they may be cautious?" (Shakir)

Scholars using this verse believe it implies that the people (who the experts of religion return to) must heed the warnings of these experts of religion and this “heeding” is absolute i.e. not dependent on the people reaching certainty about these experts, and thus punishable if not followed.

There is a long discussion but the most potent argument against this line of reasoning is that this may give credence to the idea that an expert should be listened to, but is irrelevant to the discussion we are having about relying on a trustworthy person transmitting a narration.

This verse is thus not seen in the same light as that in Surah Naba, and is not considered to be useful in this discussion.

We have now discussed the main verses from the Qur`an that are used, and we will now move onto narrations. It is important to note, that it is clearly not possible to use narrations that are of this category i.e.khabar wahid to determine the authority of these narrations, otherwise it would be a circular argument.

We thus have to consider only narrations that must be correct because they have been narrated by many independent people at each generation since the time of the Prophet (SAW) i.e. tawatur. This is authoritative because of the extreme unlikelihood of every one of the narrators (who are examined to be trustworthy) to have lied independently and reached the same conclusion (Shahid al-Sadr uses a rational calculation of probabilities argument to discuss the implausibility of this being wrong). This will be the focus of the next blog!