Jarh

Jarh is an Arabic term with several related meanings, depending on context. In general Arabic usage, jarh denotes a wound or injury, stemming from the root j-r-h meaning to wound or hurt. In medical and everyday language, it describes physical harm to tissue or the result of an injury, and the word appears in classical and modern Arabic medical texts in that sense.

In Islamic scholarship, jarh has a technical meaning within the science of hadith. Ilm al-jarh wa ta'deel, literally the science of criticism and verification, evaluates the reliability of narrators. In this context jarh refers to the act of criticizing a narrator for unreliability, memory problems, or dishonesty, while ta'deel refers to praising a narrator for trustworthiness. The combined practice assesses the credibility of chains of transmission (isnad) and helps determine whether a reported hadith is acceptable. Narrators are categorized according to their reliability, with judgments about jarh influencing the assessment of a hadith’s authenticity.

Overall, jarh illustrates how a single term can span practical, medical, and scholarly domains. Its precise meaning is determined by linguistic context: a physical wound in medical Arabic, or a methodological critique in hadith studies within Islamic scholarship. The word derives from the Arabic root j-r-h, which conveys harm, injury, or damage.