What is Rijāl?
A plain-language introduction to ʿilm al-rijāl and the Rijāl library — what the science studies and what you can do here.
On this page
Rijāl is the Quran Gallery library for the narrators of hadith and the classic books that record their lives. Open it at qurangallery.com/rijal. You can read the great biographical works of the tradition, search them by narrator, and read each entry alongside the original printed pages — no account required.
ʿIlm al-rijāl in plain terms
A hadith is a report about the Prophet ﷺ, and every report travels down a chain (an isnād) of people who passed it on — each one narrating from the one before. To trust a report, the scholars first had to know the people in that chain: who they were, when they lived, who they learned from, and whether they were careful and honest.
The science of studying those people is called ʿilm al-rijāl — literally “the knowledge of the men,” meaning the narrators. Over the centuries, scholars wrote enormous biographical dictionaries cataloguing thousands of narrators. A few terms you will meet:
| Term | Plain meaning |
|---|---|
| Rijāl | The narrators of hadith — the people in the chains of transmission. |
| ʿIlm al-rijāl | The study of those narrators: their lives, dates, and reliability. |
| Isnād | The chain of narrators through which a report reaches us. |
| Ṭabaqāt | “Generations” or “classes” — narrators grouped by era, starting with the Companions. |
| Jarḥ wa taʿdīl | “Criticism and accreditation” — the scholars’ verdicts on how reliable a narrator was. |
You do not need any of this vocabulary to start reading. The library is a reading surface first — the terms above simply describe what the books you are reading are about.
What you can do here
Rijāl is organised as a library of works. Each work is a complete biographical book; inside it, every narrator has their own entry. From the home page you can:
- Browse the library — works grouped by genre, such as Ṭabaqāt (generational biographies). See The library.
- Open a work — read its details, then move through it by volume or search it by narrator name. See Reading a work.
- Find a narrator — search a book by name (in Arabic) or by entry number to jump straight to a person. See Finding narrators.
- Read an entry — the narrator’s biography in full, with the original manuscript pages beside it. See The narrator entry.
- Sign in across the suite — reading needs no account, and a personal list of saved narrators is on the way. See Saving & accounts.
A growing library
The library is being built out over time. Today it opens with the foundational Kitāb al-Ṭabaqāt al-Kabīr of Ibn Saʿd (d. 230 AH) — one of the earliest and most important biographical collections, spanning eleven volumes and thousands of narrators. More works and genres are added as they are prepared.
Some deeper tools — chain analysis and side-by-side reliability gradings drawn across many books — are still on the way. When you see a “coming soon” note in the app, that is what it refers to. Everything described in these pages is available to read now.