The Imams of hadith have concluded that if a person wishes to practice upon a particular hadith, he should be well aware of the conditions of its narrator. This is also one of the major reasons why the learned elders [masha’ikh] prohibit the
ordinary laymen from practicing upon a hadith directly without the consent of the scholars. Imam Nawawi writes in his commentary on al-Arba’in:

"The person who wishes to prove anything on the basis, of any of the hadiths appearing in the Sunan collections of Imam Abu Dawud, Tirmidhi,. Nasa’i Ibn Maja and in the Musannafs of Ibn Abi Shayba or Abd al-Razzaq’ ibn al-Humans, and other hadith books which have many weak narrations and that person has little capability to differentiate between the authentic and unauthentic, he is still not permitted to employ a particular hadith to prove something until he verifies the continuation of the link of narrators and studies the conditions of its narrators. If he does not possess these capabilities, he is compelled to follow an Imam and he is not permitted to draw his own deductions from the hadiths, lest he should fall into falsehood."

Most of the jurists and hadith scholars have explicitly concluded that a person cannot be permitted to practice upon hadith directly if he does not have the capacity to differentiate between the reliable and unreliable, between the hadith that abrogates and the one that is abrogated, and between the general statements and the specifying statements of Allah’s Messenger (PBUH) .

This is so obvious that it does not require any explicit mention. How can a person who is unable to distinguish between the reliable and unreliable practice upon a narration?




Taken From the Book "The Differences of the Imams"