Hadith studies is the academic study of hadith, a literature typically thought in Islamic religion to be a record of the words, actions, and the silent approval of the Islamic prophet Muhammad as transmitted through chains of narrators.An Introduction to the Science of Hadith, translated by Eerik Dickinson, from the translator's introduction, p. xiii, Garnet publishing, Reading, U.K., first edition, 2006.
A major area of interest in hadith studies has been the degree to which hadith can be used as a reliable source for reconstructing the biography of Muhammad, in parallel to the Islamic discipline of the hadith sciences. Since the pioneering work of Ignaz Goldziher, the consensus has been that hadith are a more faithful source for understanding the religious, historical, and social developments in the first two centuries of Islam than they are a reliable record of Muhammad's life, especially concerning the formation of Islamic law, theology, and piety during the Umayyad and early Abbasid eras.
Among other reasons, historians are skeptical of understanding the historical Muhammad through hadith due to the late date for when the hadith compilations were made, the sentiment that their chains of transmission (isnad) were a secondary development, and the prevalence of falsified hadith. In addition, there has been skepticism concerning whether the methods of the hadith sciences can reliably discriminate between authentic and inauthentic hadith. Despite this, recent methodological developments by scholars like Harald Motzki have shown that some hadith can be traced as early as the late seventh or early eighth century.
While hadith studies was preoccupied with the question of authenticity during the twentieth century, the scope of the field today has broadened to address questions such as what role hadith played in the intellectual and social histories of Muslim societies.
Emergence of hadith
Hadith and Sunnah The earliest schools and scholars of Islamic law—starting around a century and a half after the death of Muhammad—did not all agree on the importance of prophetic sunnah and its basis, the basis for which was the group of hadith ultimately attributed to Muhammad and his followers. Opinion ranged from prophetic hadith being one source of law among others (such as caliphal tradition or reports going back to Muhammad's followers), as was held by the ahl al-raʿy to outright rejection of hadith on the basis of their potentially tenuous historicity, as was held by the ahl al-kalām (referred to by some as "speculative theologians").
Hadith canonization A sizable shift in practice in favor of the tradition of prophetic hadith and its basis for Islamic law (fiqh) came with al-Shāfiʿī (767–820 CE), founder of the Shafi'i school of law. According to this school of thought, prophetic hadith override all other hadith. It is unlikely that consensus yet existed for this view at this time as Shafi'i would come to spend great effort on establishing and promulgating his views over other ones. For those who criticized the reliability of hadith on the basis of their long phase of oral transmission, al-Shafi'i responded by arguing that God's wish for people to follow Muhammad's example would result in God ensuring the preservation of the tradition. Sunnah became a source of divine revelation (wahy) and the basis of classical Islamic law (Sharia), especially in consideration of the brevity dedicated to the subject of law in the Quran (which, for example, does not comment in detail on ritual like Ghusl or Wudu,An-Nawawi, Riyadh As-Salihin, 1975: p.203 or salat, the correct forms of salutations,An-Nawawi, Riyadh As-Salihin, 1975: p.168 and the importance of benevolence to slaves.An-Nawawi, Riyadh As-Salihin, 1975: p.229) Al Shafi'is advocacy played a decisive role in elevating the status of hadith although some skepticism along that of earlier lines would continue.
Hadith authentication and collection
Once (authentic) hadith had attained their elevated status among the group inspired by al-Shafi'i who sought to establish Islamic practice on the basis of the Sunnah (Muhammad's deeds and sayings), the focus shifted amongst advocates of this group (who were called the ahl al-sunnah, or the "People of the Sunnah") to delineating between reliable or "sound" (ṣaḥīḥ) with unreliable hadith. The field that arose to meet this need came to be known as the hadith sciences (), and this practice had entered into a mature stage by the 3rd century of Islam. The hadith sciences helped undergird the triumph of Al-Shafi'is prioritization of prophetic hadith which became the primary sources of Islamic law and also became "ideological" tools in political/theological conflicts.
A challenge the hadith sciences had to confront was the massive scale of hadith forgery, with Muhammad al-Bukhari claiming that only ~7,400 narrations of 600,000 he investigated met his criteria for inclusion. Even among those 7,400, a large fraction were variants of the same report, but with a different chain of transmitters (isnad). The criteria for establishing the authenticity (sihha) of hadith came down to corroboration of the same report but from different transmitters, assessing the reliability and character of the transmitters listed in the chain (although Muhammad's companions, the sahaba, were excluded from this as their association with Muhammad immediately guaranteed their character and competence), and the lack of gaps in the chain. By implication, defects in hadith might assumed to be associated with the lack of character (ʿadāla) or competence (ḍābiṯ) of its transmitters. It was also thought that such faulty transmitters could be identified and that the isnad was a direct reflection of the history of transmission of a tradition. Evaluation rarely looked at the content (matn) of a narration as opposed to its isnad. Ultimately, evaluations of hadith remained haphazard between authors until the practice of the hadith sciences was standardized by Ibn al-Salah in the 13th century. It is through the lenses of this framework, supplemented by some additional work from Al-Dhahabi in the 14th century and Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani in the 15th century, that Muslim scholars since understood the discipline.
The first collections to be accepted as authoritative among Sunnis by the tenth century CE were the Sahihayn, referring to Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim. Even as the set of canonical texts grew, the Sahihayn remained the core of the canon, with Sahih al-Bukhari typically being viewed as the most pre-eminent of the two. The tenth century CE also saw the inclusion of another two collections to form a Four-Book canon, including the Sunan Abi Dawud and Sunan al-Nasa'i. This grew into a Five-Book canon in the twelfth century, when Sunan al-Tirmidhi was added. In the same century, the modern Six-Book canon, known as the Kutub al-Sittah, emerged. Depending on the list, the sixth canonical book was the Sunan ibn Majah, the Sunan of Al-Daraqutni, or the Muwatta of Malik ibn Anas.
Reliability of hadith
Lateness of prophetic attribution Also throwing doubt on the doctrine that common use of hadith of Muhammad goes back to the generations immediately following the his death is historian Robert G. Hoyland, who quotes acolytes of two of the earliest Islamic scholars: "I spent a year sitting with Abdullah ibn Umar (d.693, son of the second Caliph, who is said to be the second most prolific narrator of ahadith, with a total of 2,630 narrations)Siddiqi, M. Z. (1961, 2006). Hadith Literature: Its Origin, Development, Special Features and Criticism. Kuala Lumpur: Islamic Book Trust. p.27 and I did not hear him transmit anything from the prophet";Ibn Sa'd (d.845), Tabaqat, ed. E. Sachau (Leiden, 1904-1940), 4.1.106, citing al-Sha'bi ('Abdullah) "I never heard Jabir ibn Zayd (d. ca. 720) say 'the prophet said ...' and yet the young men round here are saying it twenty times an hour".Fasawi (d.890), Kitab al-Ma'rifa wa-l-ta'rikh, ed.A.D. al'Umari (Beirut, 1981), 2.15 (Jabir ibn Zayd)Hoyland, In God's Path, 2015: p.137
Hoyland states that during Umayyad times only the central government was allowed to make laws; religious scholars began to challenge this by claiming they had been transmitted hadith by Muhammad. Al-Sha'bi, a narrator of hadith, when hearing of this, criticizes people who just go around narrating many prophetic hadiths without care by saying he never heard from Umar I's son ‘Abdallah any hadith from Muhammad except just one.Fatḥ al-Bārī fī Sharḥ Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 12/256 (This is commentary on the Sunni hadith collection Sahih al-Bukhari, composed by Ibn Hajar al-'Asqalani) Hoyland vindicates Islamic sources as accurately representative of Islamic history. Gregor Schoeler writes: "He [Hoyland] shows that they [non-Islamic sources] are hardly suitable to support an alternative account of early Islamic history; on the contrary, they frequently agree with Islamic sources and supplement them."
The creation of politically convenient hadith proliferated. Even in the present day, and in the buildup to the first Gulf War, a "tradition" was published in the Palestinian daily newspaper Al-Nahar on December 15, 1990, reading: "and described as currently in wide circulation`", and it quotes Muhammad as predicting that "the Greeks and Franks will join with Egypt in the desert against a man named Sadim, and not one of them will return".
Isnads
Reza Aslan quotes Schacht's maxim: `the more perfect the isnad, the later the tradition`, which he (Aslan) calls "whimsical but accurate".No God But God : The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam by Reza Aslan, (Random House, 2005) p.163
Isnads are thought to have entered usage three-quarters of a century after Muhammad's death, before which hadith were transmitted haphazardly and anonymously. Once they began to be used, the names of authorities, popular figures, and sometimes even fictitious figures would be supplied.Juynboll, Muslim Tradition, p.72-73Ibn Rawandi, "Origins of Islam", 2000: p.118 Over time, isnads would be polished to meet stricter standards.Patricia Crone, Roman, Provincial and Islamic Law (1987/2002 paperback), pp. 23–34, paperback edition Additional concerns are raised by the substantial percentages of hadith that traditional critics are reported to have dismissed and difficulties in parsing out historical hadith from the vast pool of ahistorical ones.Crone, P., Roman, Provincial, and Islamic Law, p.33Ibn Rawandi, "Origins of Islam", 2000: p.119-120 This perspective casts doubt on traditional methods of hadith verification, given their presupposition that the isnad of a report offers a sufficiently accurate history of its transmission to be able to verify or nullify it and the prioritization of isnads over other criteria like the presence of anachronisms in a hadith which might have an isnad that passes traditional standards of verification.Goldziher, I., Muslim Studies, v.2, London, 1966, 1971, pp.140-141, quoted in Ibn Rawandi, "Origins of Islam", 2000: p.117
Biographical evaluation
Another criticism of isnads was of the efficacy of the traditional Hadith studies field known as biographical evaluations (ʿilm al-rijāl)—evaluating the moral and mental capacity of transmitters/narrators. John Wansbrough argues that the isnads are should not be accepted, because of their "internal contradiction, anonymity, and arbitrary nature":Neva & Koren, "Methodological Approaches to Islamic Studies", 2000: p.430 specifically the lack of any information about many of the transmitters of the hadith other than found in these biographical evaluations, thus putting into question whether they are "pseudohistorical projections", i.e. names made up by later transmitters.
Effectiveness of hadith sciences