Can we trust Isnad?
Traditionalists believe that because a Hadith has an isnad that, therefore it must be authentic, but again, there are a lot of problems with this kind of reasoning. The most notable is that there is no guarantee that the isnad is valid. This is because people have been fabricating isnad just as rampantly as they were fabricating Hadith.
[6:19] Say, "Whose testimony is the greatest?" Say, "GOD's. He is the witness between me and you that this Quran* has been inspired to me, to preach it to you and whomever it reaches. Indeed, you bear witness that there are other gods* beside GOD." Say, "I do not testify as you do; there is only one god, and I disown your idolatry."
(١٩) قُلْ أَىُّ شَىْءٍ أَكْبَرُ شَهَـٰدَةً قُلِ ٱللَّهُ شَهِيدٌۢ بَيْنِى وَبَيْنَكُمْ وَأُوحِىَ إِلَىَّ هَـٰذَا ٱلْقُرْءَانُ لِأُنذِرَكُم بِهِۦ وَمَنۢ بَلَغَ أَئِنَّكُمْ لَتَشْهَدُونَ أَنَّ مَعَ ٱللَّهِ ءَالِهَةً أُخْرَىٰ قُل لَّآ أَشْهَدُ قُلْ إِنَّمَا هُوَ إِلَـٰهٌ وَٰحِدٌ وَإِنَّنِى بَرِىٓءٌ مِّمَّا تُشْرِكُونَ
To put in perspective the number of inauthentic Hadith that were in circulation during the Sahih compilations in the 3rd century Hijra, Bukhari himself claimed to have written over 10 million Hadith and memorized the chain of every single one. As absurd as this claim is, he also claimed in the same excerpt below that he struggled to remember the names of his relatives.
The compilations of Kutub al-Sittah began around the year 850 CE. If we look at the respective compilers, we see that they went through hundreds of thousands of Hadith and determined that ~99% of the hadith they reviewed were either not Sahih, according to Bukhari or Muslim, or failed to even rank as Daif, according to the other compilers.
Ibn Hanbal (d. 855 CE) is said to have gone through some 750,000 Hadith and included in his Musnad any Hadith he thought could be remotely truthful, including narrations later proven to be forgeries. He believed anything that was not included in his compilation was a fabrication. This would mean he considered ~720,000 of the Hadith he reviewed fabricated. All this shows that the vast majority of Hadith in circulation were fabrications and that people were fabricating isnads along with their Hadith.
Traditionalists claim that their biographies can attest to each of the narrators in a chain of Hadith, except these biographies were not created until the 3rd century. But none of these manuscripts exist today, and most are dated to the 5th and 6th century Hijra. So to trust the isnad would imply having to rely on the ability of a person to determine the trustworthiness and reliability of someone who lived hundreds of years before them and possibly thousands of miles away.
Even the request to ask for two witnesses for each of the transmitters was enough to cause ibn Hibban to claim that such requirements would destroy the entire Sunna of the prophet.
Additionally, compilers and scholars constantly disagreed regarding which Hadith they considered authentic. Since there is no consistent approach to grading the authenticity of Hadith, the isnad, like the rest of the Hadith sciences, is at best a pseudo-science but more realistically a complete farce.
In Hadith sciences, the age requirement for reliable transmitters of Hadith is that they should have reached the age of maturity and intellectual competence. This typically means they should be mentally mature and capable of understanding and accurately transmitting the Hadith. The exact age at which one is considered mature can vary in different contexts and among scholars, but it generally aligns with the age at which a person is considered an adult in their society. However, a common practice was to include the names of children deemed to be five years or older in the books as authorized recipients of traditions.
Aside from the ridiculousness of such practices, as stated in the excerpt above, this poses a more practical problem. It is one thing to know that the transmitter is only five years old. It is another when it is unclear if the transmitter was a child or an adult when they originally heard the Hadith. It is very likely that someone might have heard the Hadith when they were a child and not of sound mind, but later on, be taught the Hadith at an older age, but make their isnad to remove that intermediary.
For example, ‘Abd al-Razzaq was an eighth-century Yemeni hadith scholar who compiled a hadith collection known as the Musannaf of Abd al-Razzaq, and when he died in 211 AH at the age of 80, his student, Ishaq ibn Ibrahim al-Dabari, who transmitted his work was not more than 7 years old.6
Despite this being stated by the Khatib, Kifayah, p. 64 and Studies in Hadith Methodology and Literature p. 23, others claim that it was al-Dabari’s father who transmitted it to his son at an older age and that al-Dabari omitted his name from the transmission and only put his own which would reduce the length of the isnad.
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