Three chains, examined

One hadith of each kind. The point is not the grade; it is that you can see where the grade comes from.

Actions are by intentions

Adds the chain, each narrator's record, and the scholars' verdicts.

إِنَّمَا الأَعْمَالُ بِالنِّيَّاتِ، وَإِنَّمَا لِكُلِّ امْرِئٍ مَا نَوَى، فَمَنْ كَانَتْ هِجْرَتُهُ إِلَى دُنْيَا يُصِيبُهَا أَوْ إِلَى امْرَأَةٍ يَنْكِحُهَا فَهِجْرَتُهُ إِلَى مَا هَاجَرَ إِلَيْهِ

Actions are only by intentions, and each person will have only what they intended. So whoever migrated for worldly gain, or for a woman to marry, their migration was for whatever they migrated to.

SahihصحيحAgreed upon: recorded by both al-Bukhari and Muslim, and accepted by every scholar who examined it. Al-Bukhari opened his Sahih with it in place of a preface.

Source: Sahih al-Bukhari, 1 · Book of Revelation, chapter 1

The chain, person by person

Reliable
Truthful, lesser precision
Weak
Abandoned
Unassessed
Companion

Read upward from the book to the Prophet ﷺ. Click a narrator to see the record critics kept on them.

View this chain as a table

Narrator	Standing	Died	Received it with
The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ	The Prophet ﷺ	11 AH	source
Umar ibn al-Khattab	Companion	23 AH	I heard the Messenger of God ﷺ say (سمعتُ رسول الله ﷺ يقول)
Alqama ibn Waqqas al-Laythi	Reliable	died during the caliphate of Abd al-Malik (65–86 AH)	I heard Umar, on the pulpit (سمعتُ عمر على المنبر)
Muhammad ibn Ibrahim al-Taymi	Reliable	120 AH	that he heard Alqama say (أنه سمع علقمة يقول)
Yahya ibn Sa'id al-Ansari	Reliable	144 AH	informed me (أخبرني)
Sufyan ibn Uyaynah	Reliable	198 AH	narrated to us (حدثنا)
Abdullah ibn al-Zubayr al-Humaydi	Reliable	219 AH	narrated to us (حدثنا)
Muhammad ibn Isma'il al-Bukhari	Reliable	256 AH	narrated to us (حدثنا)

Select a narrator to open their record: dates, teachers, and what the critics wrote, with the source for each line.

· A mountain of memory, and the world's leading authority on the understanding of hadith.
· Reliable, a hadith master and jurist; the most eminent of Ibn Uyaynah's students.
· Reliable, a hadith master, jurist, imam and proof; however his memory changed late in life, and he would sometimes transmit with an ambiguous formula, though only from reliable narrators.
· Reliable and firm.
· Reliable; has some reports no one else transmits.
· Reliable and firm, of the second generation. Whoever claimed he was a Companion erred; it is said he was born in the Prophet's lifetime.
· Companion

Who graded it, and why

We do not grade hadith. Each line is a named scholar's verdict, where they gave it, and the reason they gave. Disagreement is shown, not resolved.

Scholar	Verdict	Where	Reason given
al-Bukhari d. 256 AH	Sahihصحيح	Sahih al-Bukhari 1, 54, 2529, 3898, 5070, 6689, 6953	Chose it to open the Sahih and recorded it in seven places through five of Yahya ibn Sa'id's students (Ibn Uyaynah, Malik, al-Thawri, Hammad ibn Zayd, Abd al-Wahhab al-Thaqafi). Inclusion in the Sahih is itself a grade: every narrator meets his conditions.
Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj d. 261 AH	Sahihصحيح	Sahih Muslim 1907	Included in the Sahih, in the Book of Leadership.
al-Tirmidhi d. 279 AH	Hasan sahihصحيح	Jami' al-Tirmidhi 1647	Sound, and known only through Yahya ibn Sa'id. He also records Ibn Mahdi's remark that this hadith ought to be placed in every chapter.
al-Nawawi d. 676 AH	Sound by consensusصحيح	al-Arba'in, hadith 1; al-Minhaj Sharh Sahih Muslim 13/53	Opened his Forty with it, noting that the two imams of hadith recorded it in their Sahihs, the soundest books composed. In his commentary on Muslim he writes that the Muslims agree on its great standing, its many benefits and its soundness.
Ibn Rajab al-Hanbali d. 795 AH	Agreed uponصحيح	Jami' al-Ulum wa al-Hikam, hadith 1	Scholars agreed on its soundness and received it with acceptance; al-Bukhari opened his Sahih with it in place of a preface. Records al-Shafi'i's remark that it enters seventy chapters of law and Ahmad's that it is one of three hadith on which Islam's foundations rest.
Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani d. 852 AH	Sahih, agreed uponصحيح	Fath al-Bari, commentary on hadith 1	Agreed upon by all; recorded by every famous imam except in the Muwatta. Answers al-Tabari's observation that on some people's method it would be rejected for being single-stranded: it is single-stranded only in its sound form, and only in this wording; the meaning is attested from other Companions, and those who called it mass-transmitted erred.
Ibn Taymiyya d. 728 AH	Among the rare reports of the Sahihصحيح	Majmu' al-Fatawa, vol. 18	Sound and single-stranded at once: his phrase for exactly this shape of chain.

What this chain teaches about the method

Rare is not the same as weak

At its first four links this is a single-strand report (gharib): one Companion, one Successor, one student, one student again. It is still one of the most universally accepted hadith in the corpus, because every one of those people is of the highest grade. Rarity is a property the discipline records; weakness is a verdict it reaches only from the narrators.

The verb on each link is evidence

“Narrated to us” and “I heard” assert direct hearing. Sufyan ibn Uyaynah occasionally used an ambiguous “from”, and critics noted it. Here, in the standard recension, he says “narrated to us”, which closes the question before it is asked.

Even a master has a file

A report that Sufyan's memory failed in his last year is on record alongside his rank as an imam, and so is al-Dhahabi's rejection of that report. Ahmad's reservation about Muhammad ibn Ibrahim sits beside four critics who called him reliable. The record hides nothing; it lets a reader see how the balance was struck.

Then it becomes famous

Below Yahya ibn Sa'id the chain widens into hundreds of routes. A report can be rare at its root and widely attested at its trunk; both facts are tracked, and both matter for how later scholars weigh it.

Terms used here

Isnad إسناد: The chain of people who passed the report down, named in order.
Matn متن: The text of the report itself.
Gharib غريب: A report carried by a single narrator at some point in its chain.
Mashhur مشهور: A report carried by three or more narrators at every level, short of mass transmission. This hadith is rare at its root and became mashhur from Yahya ibn Sa'id onward.
Thiqa ثقة: A narrator critics judged both upright and precise.
Tadlis تدليس: Using an ambiguous formula like “from” that hides whether the narrator heard directly.
Muttafaq alayh متفق عليه: Recorded by both al-Bukhari and Muslim from the same Companion.

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