Majhūl al-ʿayn: a named person with only one known reporting pupil and without adequate qualifying authentication.
Majhūl al-ḥāl: a person with two or more known reporting pupils but without sufficient trustworthy appraisal of the person’s reliability.
The distinction separates establishing who a person is from establishing whether that person is reliable. More pupils can make identity better known, but their number by itself does not amount to certification of moral integrity.
Thus, when two known students report from someone but no sound critical evaluation is found, the remaining issue is the narrator’s condition, not the same kind of identity uncertainty. New credible evidence may revise the assessment.