Al-Mu‘jam al-Awsaṭ by al-Ṭabarānī; a case-study

Sunni hadith scholars deal with caution in the matter of hadith that has been quoted via a single narrator. As same as Mālik says in this regard: “The worst knowledge is al-gharīb, and the best knowledge is the apparent one (al-ẓāhir) narrated by people.” Now if a remarkable cases of hadith mufrad are narrated, the topic of doubt in the reliability of the narrator would be discussed. Having applied a descriptive-surveying method this study aims at answering the question: “Does the increase in the number of mufrad traditions cause a significant difference in the reliability of these narrators, or not?” The statistical community of this study includes 9489 traditions available in al-Mu‘jam al-Awsaṭ by al-Ṭabarānī. Among them 369 traditions were selected by the random sampling method and the number of mufrad traditions of each narrator along with his reliability were investigated by means of the One-way analysis of the variance (ANOVA) and by making use of the Least Significant Difference (LSD) method and the software of Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS). The findings of this research indicated that once the number of mufrad traditions increases, (five traditions and more), the mean value of the reliability of the narrators of these hadiths decreases significantly.