relative shortness of the chain of transmission (العُلُوّ النِّسْبِي)

الحديث

التعريف :

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There being a small number of people between the narrator and one of the leading hadith scholars. Or, that the narrator has a quality which makes his narration preferable to that of his colleagues. This has four types: 1) shortness in relation to one of the leading scholars of hadith, which means that the number of narrators up to that scholar is small, even though the number from that scholar to the end is large; 2) shortness in relation to the narration of one of the main hadith anthologies (i.e. Ꜥuluw al-tanzīl); 3) shortness due to the fact that the narrator died earlier, even though the number of narrators in both cases is equal; and 4) shortness due to the narrator having learnt the hadith earlier. This last one is particularly important in the case that the teacher suffered from dementia or impaired memory towards the end of his life.