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.
Bu sayfa henüz çevrilmedi — İngilizce sürümü gösteriliyor.
Bu sayfada
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.