Hadith
[9] The authentication of hadith became a significant discipline, focusing on the isnad (chain of narrators) and matn (main text of the report).
A minority of Muslims criticise the hadith and reject them, such as Quranists, who assert that Islamic guidance should rely solely on the Quran.
This skepticism extends even to hadith classified as sahih by Muslim scholars, as such narrations may still reflect later historical or theological concerns rather than the authentic teachings of Muhammad.
[34] In Islamic terminology, according to Juan Campo, the term hadith refers to reports of statements or actions of Muhammad, or of his tacit approval or criticism of something said or done in his presence.
[35] In contrast, according to the Shia Islam Ahlul Bayt Digital Library Project, "when there is no clear Qur'anic statement, nor is there a Hadith upon which Muslim schools have agreed.
[57] Another source (Joseph A. Islam) distinguishes between the two saying: Whereas the 'Hadith' is an oral communication that is allegedly derived from the Prophet or his teachings, the 'Sunna' (quite literally: mode of life, behaviour or example) signifies the prevailing customs of a particular community or people.
In general, the difference between Shi'a and Sunni collections is that Shia give preference to hadiths attributed to Muhammad's family and close companions (Ahl al-Bayt), while Sunnis do not consider family lineage in evaluating hadith and sunnah narrated by any of twelve thousand companions of Muhammad.
Some important elements, which are today taken to be a long-held part of Islamic practice and belief are not mentioned in the Quran, but are reported in hadiths.
[70] Hadiths were also deployed to legitimize Sufism’s more formal structures of brotherhoods (tariqas), hierarchies of initiation, and rituals that were articulated from the 9th century onward.
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.
[citation needed] 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.
[90] A Ḥadīth Dāwūd (History of David), attributed to Wahb ibn Munabbih, survives in a manuscript dated 844.
[92] A consistent fragment of the Jāmiʿ of the Egyptian Maliki jurist 'Abd Allāh ibn Wahb (d. 813) is finally dated to 889.
In the 3rd century of Islam (from 225/840 to about 275/889),[Note 3] hadith experts composed brief works recording a selection of about two- to five-thousand such texts which they felt to have been most soundly documented or most widely referred to in the Muslim scholarly community.
[95] Toward the end of the 5th century, Ibn al-Qaisarani formally standardized the Sunni canon into six pivotal works, a delineation which remains to this day.
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 bytheirs composition, such as the arbaʿīniyyāt (collections of forty hadiths).
Then all those whomever he had taught in the worldly life anything of goodness, or had opened from his heart a lock of ignorance or had removed his doubts will come out.
[103]Modern approaches include criticism of the text and content in addition to classical approaches that don't go beyond the criticism of the chain of narrators called "sanad" in order to verify a hadith;[104] Weakness in the pronunciation of the text, the strange meaning, contrary to the dalil syar'i (evidences of sharia), and the mind, related to the priority of the mind, contains abominations, isra'iliyyat and bid'ah, not found in the main hadith book and exaggerates the reward or punishment for light deeds etc.
"[106] "The intended meaning of 'other sciences' here are those pertaining to religion," explains Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, "Quranic exegesis, hadith, and jurisprudence.
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.
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.
"[107] Western scholarly criticism of hadith began in colonial India in the mid 19th century with the works of Aloys Sprenger and William Muir.
Because a chain of transmission can be a forgery, the status of authenticity given by Muslim scholars are not generally accepted by Orientalists or historians, who largely consider hadith to be unverifiable.
[9][114] According to Bernard Lewis, "In the early Islamic centuries there could be no better way of promoting a cause, an opinion, or a faction than to cite an appropriate action or utterance of the Prophet.
It is also determined whether the individual was actually able to transmit the report, which is deduced from their contemporaneity and geographical proximity with the other transmitters in the chain.
[119][117] Examples of biographical dictionaries include: Abd al-Ghani al-Maqdisi's Al-Kamal fi Asma' al-Rijal, Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani's Tahdhīb al-Tahdhīb and al-Dhahabi's Tadhkirat al-huffaz.
Two categories are: Other classifications include: Both sahīh and hasan reports are considered acceptable for usage in Islamic legal discourse.
[123] Some Muslim critics of hadith even go so far as to completely reject them as the basic texts of Islam and instead adhere to the movement called Quranism.
[124][125] Both modernist Muslims and Qur'anists believe that the problems in the Islamic world come partly from the traditional elements of the hadith and seek to reject those teachings.
[9] In addition to fabrication, it is possible for the meaning of a hadith to have greatly drifted from its original telling through the different interpretations and biases of its varying transmitters, even if the chain of transmission is authentic.
