<![CDATA[The proliferation of fabricated hadiths (maudhu‘) throughout Islamic history, driven by political, sectarian, and ideological motivations, necessitated rigorous methodological frameworks for hadith verification. Ibn al-Jawzī (d. 597 AH) developed one of the most influential yet contested approaches to identifying fabricated narrations through his seminal work al-Maudhu‘āt. While existing studies have examined hadith classification and general principles of hadith criticism, no comprehensive comparative analysis has systematically evaluated the epistemological foundations and methodological distinctions among Ibn al-Jawzī, al-Suyūṭī, and Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī within an integrated sanad-matn framework, nor explored their relevance to contemporary digital-era disinformation challenges. This study aims to analyze Ibn al-Jawzī's sanad-criticism methodology for detecting fabricated hadiths in al-Maudhu‘āt, compare it with the methodologies of al-Suyūṭī and Ibn Ḥajar, and evaluate the relevance of these classical approaches to religious information verification in the digital age. This research employs a qualitative approach combining intellectual history analysis, content analysis, and comparative methodology, with al-Maudhu‘āt as the primary data source, supplemented by al-La‘ālī al-Maṣnū‘ah and Lisān al-Mīzān as secondary sources. The findings reveal three epistemologically distinct methodological poles: Ibn al-Jawzī’s eliminative-preventive approach, which prioritizes a single defective transmitter as sufficient grounds for maudhu‘ judgment; al-Suyūṭī’s inclusive-moderate approach, which demands comprehensive cross-chain verification before issuing verdicts; and Ibn Ḥajar’s systematic historico-critical approach, which cross-references biographical data and evaluates comment consistency across sources. These three methodologies constitute a layered verification framework applicable to contemporary hadith authentication challenges, particularly for detecting religiously fabricated content on social media and for developing AI-based hadith verification algorithms. This study offers a reconstructed epistemological model of classical hadith verification that bridges pre-modern scholarship and digital-era information literacy, providing methodological foundations for AI-assisted systems for Islamic information authentication.]]>
