Around the same time, Goldziher also published a separate paper in the journal Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft about the shuʿūbiyya in Al-Andalus in the 11th century AD, with a special focus on the figure Ibn Gharsiya.
Therefore, Goldziher underlined the utility of hadith in regards to their previously acknowledged, but greatly informative nature about the intellectual and social history of the Islamic religion during a still early, but more matured phase of it.
Holtzman and Ovadia write, summarizing Muslim Studies:[7]In his monumental Muhammedanische Studien (published in 1888–1890, two years after “Ueber Geberden”), Goldziher devoted the majority of the second volume to an exploration of the development of the ḥadīth literature.
Approaching the ḥadīth as the reservoir of Arab memory, Goldziher noted that in his reading method "the Hadith will not serve as a document for the history of the infancy of Islam, but rather as a reflection of the tendencies which appeared in the community during the mature stages of its development."
This perception, however, does not contradict Goldziher’s basic approach to the ḥadīth as "a rich source for the intellectual history of early Islam and a record of how Muslims sought to establish their sense of self-identity as individuals and as a community of faith."
And indeed, when he writes about gestures in the ḥadīth, his approach is clearly non-skeptical: He does not criticize the sources but conveys their content faithfully.While Goldziher's own work focused on the hadith literature, Joseph Schacht extended his findings to Islamic law (Shariah) in a seminal publication of his own, the Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence (1950).