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In the Islam Hadith sciences, an isnād (chain of transmitters, or literally "supporting"; ) refers to a list of people who passed on a tradition, from the original authority to whom the tradition is attributed to, to the present person reciting or compiling that tradition. The tradition an isnad is associated with is called the matn. Isnads are an important feature of the genre of Islamic literature known as hadith and are prioritized in the process that seeks to determine if the tradition in question is authentic or inauthentic.
According to the traditional Islamic view, the tradition of the hadith sciences has succeeded in the use of isnads to distinguish between authentic and inauthentic traditions going back to Muhammad and his companions. The contemporary view in modern hadith studies, however, is that isnads were commonly susceptible to forgery and so had to be scrutinized before being used to guarantee the transmission of a tradition.
Joseph Horowitz proposed that the Islamic version of the practice of combining a tradition or saying with a chain of transmitters going back to an original authority stems from the instance of this tradition in rabbinic literature from whence it got adopted into the nascent hadith sciences, before it underwent a much more elaborate native systematization in the Islamic tradition. According to Michael Cook:
We can then go on to find elements in the Islamic edifice that look like specific borrowings from Judaism ... the chain of transmitters that accompanies an oral account, known on the Muslim side as the isnād, as in "Muḥammad ibn Yūsuf informed us from Sufyān from Abū ʾl-Zinād from Mūsā ibn Abī ʿUthmān from his father from Abū Hurayra from the Prophet who said..." The only other religious culture in which we find such a style of attribution is Judaism, as in “Rabbi Zeriqa said: Rabbi Ammi said: Rabbi Simeon ben Laqish said:...” What was different was that once adopted in Islam the practice was developed much more systematically and applied to a much wider range of material.One Jewish chain of transmission is reiterated in the Quran (5:44).
Lam yakūnū yas’alūna ‘an al-isnād. Fa-lammā waqa‘at al-fitna qālū: "Sammū la-nā rijāla-kum fa-yunẓaru ilā ahl al-sunna fa-yu’khadhu ḥadīthu-hum wa-yunẓaru ilā ahl al-bida‘ fa-lā yu’khadhu ḥadīthu-hum."
They were not asking about the isnād. When the fitna (civil war) broke out, they said, "name to us your informants ( rijāl), so that we can recognize the people of orthodox tradition and accept their ḥadīth, and recognize the people of heretical innovation and accept not their ḥadīth."
According to this tradition, the use of isnads begins with the era of the fitna. However, this term is ambiguous, and so much scholarly debate has concerned the meaning of fitna in this passage, as it could be taken as a reference to the First Fitna (656–616 AD) (the view of Muhammad Mustafa Azmi), the Second Fitna (680–692) (the view of G.H.A. Juynboll), or the Third Fitna (744–750) (the view of Joseph Schacht, only possible if the tradition has been misattributed to, and therefore post-dates, Ibn Sirin). Since Juynboll, who has observed that the earliest sources most commonly associate the use of this word in isolation with the Second Fitna, it has become increasingly accepted that the tradition in question localizes the beginnings of the use of isnads to the era of the Second Fitna. Furthermore, Juynboll's assessment has alleviated the skepticism towards the question of whether Ibn Sirin made this claim.
Therefore, isnads emerged in the Islamic tradition in the late first Islamic century. This occurred during the beginnings of efforts to offer systematic support for collected traditions. In this early stage, however, isnads were still not systematically invoked. The pivotal figure in the emergence of traditions concerning the Prophetic biography, Urwa ibn al-Zubayr, used isnads, but not consistently. Later on, as the hadith sciences emerged and were formalized, they were documented more rigidly.
Today, isnads are thought to have entered usage three-quarters of a century after Muhammad's death, before which hadith were transmitted haphazardly and anonymously. Once they began to be used, the names of authorities, popular figures, and sometimes even fictitious figures would be supplied.Ibn Rawandi, "Origins of Islam", 2000: p.118 Over time, isnads would be polished to meet stricter standards.Patricia Crone, Roman, Provincial and Islamic Law (1987/2002 paperback), pp. 23–34, paperback edition Additional concerns are raised by the substantial percentages of hadith that traditional critics are reported to have dismissed and difficulties in parsing out historical hadith from the vast pool of ahistorical ones.Crone, P., Roman, Provincial, and Islamic Law, p.33Ibn Rawandi, "Origins of Islam", 2000: p.119-120 This perspective casts doubt on traditional methods of hadith verification, given their presupposition that the isnad of a report offers a sufficiently accurate history of its transmission to be able to verify or nullify it and the prioritization of isnads over other criteria like the presence of anachronisms in a hadith which might have an isnad that passes traditional standards of verification.Goldziher, I., Muslim Studies, v.2, London, 1966, 1971, pp.140-141, quoted in Ibn Rawandi, "Origins of Islam", 2000: p.117
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