History According to British historian of Arab world Alfred Guillaume, it is "certain" that "several small collections" of hadith were "assembled in Umayyad times." There are conflicting reports as to whether recording hadiths from the pre-Umayyad period was recommended or prohibited, and there is no extant collection of hadiths from this period. (see:
Ban on Hadith) In Islamic law, the use of hadith as it is understood today (hadith of Muhammad with documentation, isnads, etc.) came gradually. According to scholars such as
Joseph Schacht,
Ignaz Goldziher, and Daniel W. Brown, early schools of Islamic jurisprudence used the rulings of the
Prophet's Companions, the rulings of the
Caliphs, and practices that "had gained general acceptance among the jurists of that school". On his deathbed, Caliph
Umar instructed Muslims to seek guidance from the Quran, the early Muslims (
muhajirun) who emigrated to Medina with Muhammad, the Medina residents who welcomed and supported the
muhajirun (the
ansar) and the people of the desert. It was Abū ʿAbdullāh Muhammad ibn Idrīs al-Shāfiʿī (150-204 AH), known as
al-Shafi'i, While traditionally the Qur'an has traditionally been considered superior in authority to the sunna, Al-Shafi'i "forcefully argued" that the sunna was "on equal footing with the Quran", (according to scholar Daniel Brown) for (as Al-Shafi'i put it) "the command of the Prophet is the command of God." According to the scholars Harald Motzki and Daniel W. Brown the earliest Islamic legal reasonings that have come down to us were "virtually hadith-free", but gradually, over the course of second century
A.H. "the infiltration and incorporation of Prophetic hadiths into Islamic jurisprudence" took place. In 851 the rationalist
Mu`tazila school of thought fell out of favor in the
Abbasid Caliphate. The Mu`tazila, for whom the "judge of truth ... was human reason," had clashed with traditionists who looked to the literal meaning of the Quran and hadith for truth. While the Quran had been officially compiled and approved, hadiths had not. One result was the number of hadiths began "multiplying in suspiciously direct correlation to their utility" to the quoter of the hadith (
Traditionists quoted hadith warning against listening to human opinion instead of Sharia;
Hanafites quoted a hadith stating that "In my community there will rise a man called Abu Hanifa [the Hanafite founder] who will be its guiding light". In fact one agreed upon hadith warned that, "There will be forgers, liars who will bring you hadiths which neither you nor your forefathers have heard, Beware of them." In addition the number of hadith grew enormously. While
Malik ibn Anas had attributed just 1720 statements or deeds to the Muhammad, it was no longer unusual to find people who had collected a hundred times that number of hadith. Faced with a huge corpus of miscellaneous traditions supporting different views on a wide variety of controversial matters—some of them flatly contradicting each other—Islamic scholars of the Abbasid period sought to authenticate hadith. Scholars had to decide which hadith were to be trusted as authentic and which had been fabricated for political or theological purposes. To do this, they used a number of techniques that Muslims now call the
science of hadith. The earliest surviving hadith manuscripts were copied on papyrus. A long scroll collects traditions transmitted by the scholar and qadi 'Abd Allāh ibn Lahīʻa (d. 790). A
Ḥadīth Dāwūd (
History of David), attributed to
Wahb ibn Munabbih, survives in a manuscript dated 844. A collection of hadiths dedicated to invocations to God, attributed to a certain Khālid ibn Yazīd, is dated 880–881. A consistent fragment of the
Jāmiʿ of the Egyptian Maliki jurist 'Abd Allāh ibn Wahb (d. 813) is finally dated to 889.
Shia and Sunni textual traditions Sunni and Shia hadith collections differ because scholars from the two traditions differ as to the reliability of the narrators and transmitters. Narrators who sided with
Abu Bakr and
Umar rather than
Ali, in the disputes over leadership that followed the death of Muhammad, are considered unreliable by the Shia; narrations attributed to
Ali and the family of Muhammad, and to their supporters, are preferred. Sunni scholars put trust in narrators such as
Aisha, whom Shia reject. Differences in hadith collections have contributed to differences in worship practices and shari'a law and have hardened the dividing line between the two traditions.
Extent and nature in the Sunni tradition In the Sunni tradition, the number of such texts is somewhere between seven and thirteen thousand, but the number of
hadiths is far greater because several
isnad sharing the same text are each counted as individual hadith. If, say, ten companions record a text reporting a single incident in the life of Muhammad, hadith scholars can count this as ten hadiths. Thus, Musnad Ahmad, for example, has over 30,000 hadiths—but this count includes texts that are repeated in order to record slight variations within the text or within the chains of narrations. Identifying the narrators of the various texts, comparing their narrations of the same texts to identify both the soundest reporting of a text and the reporters who are most sound in their reporting occupied experts of hadith throughout the 2nd century. In the 3rd century of Islam (from 225/840 to about 275/889),
hadith experts composed brief works recording a selection of about two- to five-thousand such texts that they felt to have been most soundly documented or most widely referred to in the Muslim scholarly community. The 4th and 5th century saw these six works being commented on quite widely. This auxiliary literature has contributed to making their study the place of departure for any serious study of hadith. In addition, Bukhari and Muslim in particular, claimed that they were collecting only the soundest of sound hadiths. These later scholars tested their claims and agreed to them, so that today, they are considered the most reliable collections of hadith. Toward the end of the 5th century,
Ibn al-Qaisarani formally standardized the Sunni canon into
six pivotal works, a delineation that remains to this day. Over the centuries, several different categories of collections have emerged. Some are more general, such as the
muṣannaf, the
muʿjam, and the
jāmiʿ, and some more specific, characterized either by the subjects covered, such as the
sunan (restricted to legal-liturgical traditions), or by
theirs composition, such as the
arbaʿīniyyāt (collections of forty hadiths).
Extent and nature in the Shia tradition Shi'a Muslims seldom if ever use the
six major hadith collections followed by the Sunnis because they do not trust many of the Sunni narrators and transmitters. They have their own extensive hadith literature. The best-known hadith collections are
The Four Books, which were compiled by three authors who are known as the 'Three Muhammads'. The Four Books are:
Kitab al-Kafi by
Muhammad ibn Ya'qub al-Kulayni al-Razi (329
AH),
Man la yahduruhu al-Faqih by
Muhammad ibn Babuya and
Al-Tahdhib and
Al-Istibsar both by
Shaykh Muhammad Tusi. Shi'a clerics also make use of extensive collections and commentaries by later authors. Unlike Sunnis, the majority of Shia do not consider any of their hadith collections to be sahih (authentic) in their entirety. Therefore, each individual hadith in a specific collection must be investigated separately to determine its authenticity. The Akhbari school, however, considers all the hadith from the four books to be authentic. The importance of hadith in the Shia school of thought is well documented. This can be captured by Ali ibn Abi Talib, cousin of Muhammad, when he narrated that "Whoever of our Shia (followers) knows our
Shariah and takes out the weak of our followers from the darkness of ignorance to the light of knowledge (Hadith) which we (Ahl al-Bayt) have gifted to them, he on the day of judgement will come with a crown on his head. It will shine among the people gathered on the plain of resurrection." Al-Baqir also emphasized the selfless devotion of Ahl al-Bayt to preserving the traditions of Muhammad through his conversation with
Jabir ibn Abd Allah, an old companion of Muhammad. He (Al-Baqir) said, "Oh Jabir, had we spoken to you from our opinions and desires, we would be counted among those who are destroyed. We speak to you of the hadith which we treasure from the Messenger of Allah, Oh Allah grant compensation to Muhammad and his family worthy of their services to your cause, just as they treasure their gold and silver." The mainstream sects consider hadith to be essential supplements to, and clarifications of, the Quran, Islam's holy book, as well as for clarifying issues pertaining to Islamic jurisprudence.
Ibn al-Salah, a hadith specialist, described the relationship between hadith and other aspects of the religion by saying: "It is the science most pervasive in respect to the other sciences in their various branches, in particular to jurisprudence being the most important of them." "The intended meaning of 'other sciences' here are those pertaining to religion," explains Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, "Quranic exegesis, hadith, and jurisprudence. The
science of hadith became the most pervasive due to the need displayed by each of these three sciences. The need hadith has of its science is apparent. As for Quranic
exegesis, then the preferred manner of explaining the speech of God is by means of what has been accepted as a statement of Muhammad. The one looking to this is in need of distinguishing the acceptable from the unacceptable. Regarding jurisprudence, then the jurist is in need of citing as an evidence the acceptable to the exception of the later, something only possible utilizing the science of hadith."
Western scholarship Western scholarly criticism of hadith began in colonial India in the mid 19th century with the works of
Aloys Sprenger and
William Muir. These works were generally critical of the reliability of hadith, suggesting that traditional Muslim scholarship was incapable of determining the authenticity of hadith, and that the hadith tradition had been corrupted by widespread fabrication of fraudulent hadith. The late 19th century work of
Ignaz Goldziher,
Muhammedanische Studien (
Muslim Studies), is considered seminal in the field of Western hadith studies. Goldziher took the same critical approach as Sprenger and Muir, suggesting that many hadith showed anachronistic elements indicating that they were not authentic, and that the many contradictory hadith made the value of the entire corpus questionable. Some modern scholars have contested Schacht's assertion that the "common links" were likely forgers of the hadith, instead suggesting that they were avid collectors of hadiths, though their arguments for this have been criticised by other scholars. ==Studies and authentication==