Mu'dal and Further Types of Disconnected Chains

Having examined the mursal — where the break in the chain occurs at the Companion level — Ibn Hajar turns to other forms of disconnection. The mu'dal hadith represents a more severe form of disconnection: one in which two or more consecutive narrators have been omitted from anywhere in the chain. This double (or multiple) break makes it considerably more difficult to reconstruct the transmission path, and the mu'dal is therefore regarded as weaker than the mursal or the simple munqati'.

A classic example of mu'dal that appears in the literature is when a compiler narrates a hadith saying "The Prophet ﷺ said..." with no chain at all, or only a partial chain that omits two or more generations. In such cases, the reader has no information about who transmitted the hadith in the intervening generations. Even if the compiler himself is known and reliable, the gap creates an unresolvable uncertainty about what occurred in the missing transmission steps.

The mu'allaq (suspended) hadith is a related category describing a chain from which one or more narrators have been omitted from the beginning — that is, the compiler omits his own teacher, or his teacher's teacher, and begins the chain at a later point. The mu'allaq is particularly associated with Sahih al-Bukhari, where al-Bukhari sometimes records hadiths without his own chain, giving only the end of the chain or a brief summary form. These mu'allaqat of Bukhari have been extensively studied — Ibn Hajar himself devoted a major work, Taghliq al-Ta'liq, to tracing the connected chains for each of Bukhari's mu'allaqat.

Another related concept is the munqati' in the strict technical sense — a chain with a single break somewhere in the middle, distinct from the mursal (break at the Companion level), the mu'dal (double break anywhere), and the mu'allaq (break at the beginning). Scholars note that the terminology varies across regions and eras: what the scholars of Khorasan called mursal is sometimes what the Hijazi scholars called munqati', and students must be attentive to these regional and historical variations in usage.

The collective study of all these disconnection types is pursued through what scholars call the science of ma'rifat al-muttasil wa-l-munfasil — knowing the connected and the separated. It requires cross-referencing multiple collections, comparing chains, and consulting biographical dictionaries to establish or refute the possibility of transmission between narrators. This remains one of the most demanding and rewarding areas of classical hadith scholarship.