Al-Manẓūmah al-Bayqūniyyah

This brief poem classifies 34 types of hadith narration from sahih and hasan to daif and its subcategories providing the essential taxonomy of hadith terminology in a memorizable format. Despite its extreme brevity it has become the standard entry point into mustalahal-hadith and is the subject of dozens of commentaries.

Umar ibn Muhammad al-Bayquni (d. ~1669 CE) was a Syrian hadith scholar and poet from Damascus whose personal biography is sparsely documented a fitting irony given that his life's work was classifying the reliability of narrators. His thirty-four-line manzumah became the canonical entry point into the science of hadith terminology (mustalah al-hadith), generating dozens of commentaries and superseding longer prose introductions by virtue of its sheer memorability.

• 34 types of hadith narrations classified and defined in rajaz verse
• Sahih (authentic): its five conditions and subdivisions
• Hasan (good): its conditions and relationship to sahih
• Daif (weak): definition and the primary causes of weakness
• Mawduu (fabricated): the most severe category of weakness
• Mutawatir (mass-transmitted) vs. Ahad (individually narrated)
• Mursal, munqati, mudal broken chain types classified
• Shadhdhah (anomalous) and munkar (rejected) narrations
• Maqlub (reversed), mudtarib (confused), musahhaf (distorted) hadith