Isnad
In the Islamic study of hadith, an isnād (chain of transmitters, or literally “supporting”; Arabic: اِسْناد) 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.
other traditions have their own chains of transmission—Judaism with its masorah of the Oral Law, Buddhism with its dharma transmission, even Christianity with apostolic succession. But let us be precise: these are spiritual or doctrinal lineages, whereas the isnād in Islam is not merely a spiritual claim but a forensically rigorous epistemology. It applies not only to matters of creed and law, but also to language itself—the recitation of the Qur’an, the grammar of Arabic, the very vocalization of letters and tajwīd rules are preserved by isnād.
No other civilization established a system where every word, every vowel, every chain of narration was scrutinized through a science of reliability (ʿilm al-rijāl) and cross-verification, producing entire disciplines of jarḥ wa-taʿdīl (criticism and validation). A rabbi may claim to be in the chain from Moses, or a Zen master from the Buddha, but there is no documented biographical database of thousands of transmitters judged for their memory, trustworthiness, travels, and precision, generation after generation.
Scholars like Ignác Goldziher and Joseph Schacht—despite their Orientalist biases—admitted that isnād as a methodological apparatus is uniquely Islamic. Others had spiritual genealogies, yes, but not a scientific apparatus of transmission applied to both sacred text and linguistic form.