Ibn Hajar's Corrections of Adh-Dhahabi

One of the most intellectually significant aspects of Lisan al-Mizan is Ibn Hajar's willingness to correct adh-Dhahabi openly. While adh-Dhahabi was one of the greatest hadith scholars of the generation preceding Ibn Hajar, and while Ibn Hajar clearly respected him deeply, the principles of intellectual honesty required that errors be identified and corrected regardless of the authority of their source.

Ibn Hajar's corrections fall into several categories. The most common involves cases where adh-Dhahabi included a narrator in Mizan al-I'tidal who was actually reliable and should not have been in a work focused on criticized narrators. In these cases, Ibn Hajar notes that the narrator was unjustly included, provides the positive assessments overlooked by adh-Dhahabi, and defends the narrator's reliability.

A second category involves cases where adh-Dhahabi confused two different narrators with the same or similar names. Such confusions — called ishtibah (resemblance) — are a recognized hazard in rijal scholarship given the Arabic naming conventions that can produce numerous individuals with identical full names. Ibn Hajar identifies these confusions, distinguishes the narrators correctly, and attributes the criticisms to the appropriate individual.

A third category involves adh-Dhahabi's assessments being based on incomplete information. When Ibn Hajar had access to biographical sources not available to adh-Dhahabi, he could correct assessments that were based on a partial picture. For example, if adh-Dhahabi criticized a narrator based on one critic's assessment without having access to the many positive assessments in other sources, Ibn Hajar could present the full range of opinions and reach a more balanced judgment.

In some cases, Ibn Hajar disagreed with adh-Dhahabi on matters of interpretation rather than fact — seeing the same evidence differently and reaching a different conclusion about the narrator's overall reliability level. These substantive disagreements are the most intellectually interesting portions of Lisan al-Mizan and demonstrate that hadith criticism, like all scholarly disciplines, involves judgment as well as documentation.

Ibn Hajar also identifies cases where adh-Dhahabi's Mizan includes narrators from the six canonical collections who should have been in Tahdhib al-Kamal rather than Mizan, and he handles these by noting the overlap and directing the reader to the more appropriate reference.