The rule of compensating the weakness of sanad of hadith with scholars’ act upon them has long been discussed by the jurists and has a great application in jurisprudential deduction. This article studies this issue with a critical analytical approach.
Although this rule has been approved by early Shia scholars, but later it became criticized and some arguments proposed against it. Generally, there are four opinions about this rule: absolute acceptance, absolute rejection, acceptance in the case of personal conjecture, and acceptance in the case of derived (mutalaqqat) principles.
This article studies these opinions and the arguments for early scholars’ opinion. Undoubtedly, the certainty achieved by the act of scholars upon a hadith is stronger than the one by Rijali scholars.