Open almost any Islamic app, or almost any Islamic account on social media, and you will find narrations presented as bare quotations: elegant typography, an attribution to the Prophet ﷺ, and nothing else. No collection. No number. No grading.
That last omission is the serious one, and it is worth being precise about why.
What a grading is
A grading is a scholarly verdict on the chain that carried a narration — whether each transmitter was known, reliable, and actually met the person they reported from. Sahih and hasan mean the chain holds. Da’if means it does not, to some degree. Mawdu’ means the narration was fabricated outright.
Crucially, a grading is a statement about transmission, not about whether the sentiment sounds pious. Plenty of fabricated narrations sound extremely pious. That is generally why they were fabricated.
The practical consequence
When a narration arrives without its grading, you are being asked to act on it without being told how much weight it can carry. If it turns out to be weak, three things follow, and none of them are small:
- You may take on an act of worship that was never legislated.
- You may attribute to the Prophet ﷺ words he did not say — which the scholars of hadith treated as among the gravest errors precisely because it is irreversible once it spreads.
- You lose the ability to check. A quote with no collection and no number cannot be looked up, and a claim that cannot be checked is not really a claim at all.
Where scholars disagree, both verdicts belong on the page
Grading is a scholarly discipline, and disciplines have disagreements. A narration graded sahih by one scholar may be graded da’if by another, because they weighed a transmitter differently.
The dishonest move here is easy and common: publish the verdict that supports the point you wanted to make, and omit the other. We do not do that. Where recognised graders differ, both assessments are shown on the item — you can see the disagreement, and you know that you are looking at a contested narration rather than a settled one.
Why we made it structurally impossible to omit
The rule is easy to state and easy to forget under deadline. So on this site and in the app it is not a rule at all — it is a constraint in the data model.
A narration is stored as a structured record with mandatory fields: the Arabic, at least one translation from a named published source, the collection, the number, the grading, and the name of the scholar who graded it. A record missing any of those is not a valid record, so the site does not merely fail to publish it — the build stops.
That is a deliberately blunt instrument, and it costs us: it is the reason this website publishes a handful of narrations rather than thousands. We would rather publish less and be checkable.
The narration this all rests on
Which brings us to the one that is usually quoted about intentions, and is worth reading again in this context:
إِنَّمَا الأَعْمَالُ بِالنِّيَّاتِ، وَإِنَّمَا لِكُلِّ امْرِئٍ مَا نَوَى، فَمَنْ كَانَتْ هِجْرَتُهُ إِلَى دُنْيَا يُصِيبُهَا أَوْ إِلَى امْرَأَةٍ يَنْكِحُهَا فَهِجْرَتُهُ إِلَى مَا هَاجَرَ إِلَيْهِ
Innama al-a'malu bi'n-niyyat, wa innama li-kulli imri'in ma nawa. Fa-man kanat hijratuhu ila dunya yusibuha aw ila imra'atin yankihuha, fa-hijratuhu ila ma hajara ilayh.
The reward of deeds depends upon the intentions and every person will get the reward according to what he has intended. So whoever emigrated for worldly benefits or for a woman to marry, his emigration was for what he emigrated for.
Intending to benefit people is not sufficient. It is necessary — but the narration says the deed is judged by the intention, not that a good intention repairs a careless deed. Spreading something unverified with a sincere heart still spreads something unverified.
Sources
- Sahih al-Bukhari 1