The Concept of Tawaatur

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The first thing to be considered when a report reaches us is how did
it reach us, is it by way of Tawaatur, or by way of Ahad?
Tawatur in the Arabic language comes from the tri-literal root wa• to
• ra, represented in English by the letters 'w' • 't' • 'r'. Some
words derived from this root have "consecutiveness," "rapid
succession," or copiousness woven into their meaning in one way or
another.
For example, Allaah Says (what means): {Then We sent Our messengers in
succession.} [Quran 23:44] The word used in Arabic is tatra, which
means one after the other, in succession. Besides, in a great poem,
Labeed Ibn Rabee'ah describes the raindrops descending in "rapid
succession," drenching the fur coat of a doe, using the word
Mutawaatir.
Phonetically (and even visually when the sounds are written in English
letters), this word soundsis like its meaning: watara watara
watara....You can imaginethat sound of raindrops patteringagainst a
window-pane, one dropafter another.
Tawaatur in the terminology of the scholars of hadeeth means
transmitting a narration or religious text by a group of narrators
from a group of narrators, generation after generation and so forth,
and theyare all trustworthy people and it is absolutely impossible for
them to agree on a lie. The relationshipbetween the terminological
meaning and the linguistic one is that what is Mutawaatir is reported
by one person after the other after the other and so on, as if the
people were coming like raindrops in a downpour.
For example, take the great Indian Ocean tsunami that hit Asia and
Africa on 26 December 2004. The vast majority of readersof this
article were not eyewitnesses to its actual occurrence. Nor can one
depend on what was seen on television to prove that it did happen
because we all know that film technology is eminently capable of
producing imagery, whether accurate or fake.
Even if we exclude the possibility of tampering with images, the
report we received was that the tsunami hit the entire coastline of
the Indian Ocean, Asia, and Africa, while the images we saw only
covered a minute portion of this. What would you say if I told you
that he tsunami never happened and that the news wasa conspiracy? You
would reject what I said without investigation, and you would be right
in doing so because it would be irrational to think that millions of
people who were, indeed, witnesses to the tsunamiwould conspire to
invent such a lie. Even though you were likely not an eyewitness to
the tsunami, you can be 100 percent certain that it did happen. This
is an example of a Mutawaatir report.
There are three conditions that must be fulfilled for a report to be Mutawaatir:
1. A large unexceptionable number of people convey the report. There
is no specific number that constitutes a "large number." Rather, this
is defined by the impossibility of conspiracy or collective mistake.
2. That there are a large number of people in every link of the chain
of narrators.
3. That the conveyed report itself be about something that is tangible
or perceptible, such as:"We saw," or, "We heard," or,"We felt," and so
on. So saying, for example, that the universe began with a big bang
cannot be Mutawaatir, since it is something conceptual, something that
noneof us were capable of perceiving. However, that does not mean that
the big bang is false. It just means that it is not a
Mutawaatirreport.
There are two categories of Mutawaatir reports:
The first category is those reportsthat are conveyed word for
word,such as the statement of the Prophet : "He who lies about me
intentionally, then let him await his place in Hell-Fire." More than
70 Companions who actuallyhad heard the Prophet saying these words had
reported it. Then the number increased in every successive link of the
chain through the generations.
The second category of Mutawaatir reports are those Ahadeeth whose
meanings are conveyed by Tawaatur but not a verbatim, word-for-word
statement, such as the fact that the Prophet, sallallaahu alayhi
sallam, used to raise his hands while supplicating. This has been
reported in about 100 Ahadeeth, all of which have some variations,but
make the common, perceptible observation that the Prophet used to
raise his hands when supplicating.
There are a significant number of Mutawaatir reports, but the vast
majority of Hadeeth literature is comprised of Ahad reports, meaning
anything that does not fall under the category of Tawaatur.
The scholar, Jamal Al-Deen Al-Sayooti, and others have compiled these
Mutawaatir reports into books of their own for easy reference.
This is the general idea of the concept of Tawaatur.