Ruways, Rawh and Two Short Chains

Most of the twenty transmissions reach their reader through one or more intermediate teachers, and a few of them span a century or more. Yaqub's do not. Ruways and Rawh both read to Yaqub himself, and both died within four years of each other in the 230s of the Hijra, so the line from reader to transmitter is as direct as any in the canon. It is a useful thing to notice, because it makes visible something the canon otherwise hides. The pairing of one reader with two named transmitters is a fixed convention, applied uniformly across all ten, and it conceals a great deal of variation in what the pairs actually are. In some cases the two transmitters are students of the reader. In others they are students of a common intermediary, as with al-Duri and al-Susi under Abu Amr.

In others again, as with al-Bazzi and Qunbul under Ibn Kathir, they are separated from the reader by more than a hundred years and by several named teachers each. The convention says which onward lines the discipline accepts as carrying the reading, not who sat in front of whom. Yaqub's case is the simple one, and knowing that the simple case exists is what makes the complicated ones legible rather than suspicious. Ruways and Rawh differ from each other in the way every such pair does, across a body of detail rather than in the reading itself, and both are studied as full transmissions with their own manuals. Their closeness to Yaqub does not make them more authoritative than a pair separated from its reader by a century, because the standard the discipline applies is the soundness of the whole chain and not its length.