Mohammad Ghandehari

Text-reuse detection and analysis has attracted scholars from diverseliterary domains, from Classical to Arabic, and Chinese studies. Textreusepatterns are analyzed to discover relationships between texts,find out the make-up of complex texts, and evaluate the reception oftexts, among several others.That said, one important aspect of Arabic textual tradition is that insome fields where authority and authenticity matters, writers andtransmitters used to bolster their text via a transmission chain, knownas isnād, from his teacher to an earlier authority (ex. the Prophet inhadith literature). Traditionally, isnāds were meant to provide a basisfor guaranteeing narrative reliability, but it soon became evident thatisnād-based evaluation, despite its usefulness in some circumstances,suffers from a severe problem, namely the possibility of being modifiedalong with the very text that it was supposed to guarantee.It was not uncommon for some medieval compilers to modify theirisnāds in order to cover a problem therein. The problem was usuallythe presence, in the chain, of a person accused of being negligent, unknown,or liar, and, consequently (s)he might have decided to changeor even drop that name from the isnād. Cases of changing the wholeisnād in favor of a better known isnād are also attested. Medieval Arabicbiographies and bibliographies are rife with the mentions of these