Hadith: Encyclopedia II - Hadith - How hadith were collected and evaluated

Hadith - How hadith were collected and evaluated

Traditions regarding the life of Muhammad and the early history of Islam were passed down orally for more than a hundred years after the death of Muhammad in 632.

Muslim historians say that it was the caliph Uthman (the third caliph, or successor of Muhammad, who had formerly been Muhammad's secretary), who first urged Muslims both to write down the Qur'an in a fixed form, and to write down the hadith. Uthman's labors were cut short by his assassination, at the hands of aggrieved soldiers, in 656.

The Muslim community (ummah) then fell into a prolonged civil war, termed the Fitna by Muslim historians. After the fourth caliph, Ali ibn Abi Talib, was assassinated, control of the Islamic empire was seized by the Umayyad dynasty in 661. Ummayad rule was interrupted by a second civil war (the Second Fitna), re-established, then ended in 758, when the Abbasid dynasty seized the caliphate, to hold it, at least in name, until 1258.

Muslim historians say that hadith collection and evaluation continued during the first Fitna and the Umayyad period. However, much of this activity was presumably oral transmission from early Muslims to later collectors, or from teachers to students. If any of these early scholars committed any of these collections to writing, they have not survived. The histories and hadith collections we possess today were written down at the start of the Abbasid period, more than one hundred years after the death of Muhammad.

The scholars of the Abbasid period were faced with an huge corpus of miscellaneous traditions, some of them flatly contradicting each other. Many of these traditions supported differing views on a variety of controversial matters. Scholars had to decide which hadith were to be trusted as authentic narrations and which had been invented for various political or theological purposes. For this purpose, they used a number of techniques which Muslims now call the “science of hadith”.

The commonest technique consisted of a careful examination of the isnad, or chain of transmission. Each hadith was accompanied by an isnad: A heard it from B who heard it from C who heard it from a companion of Muhammad. Isnads were carefully scrutinized to see if the chain was possible (for example, making sure that all transmitters and transmittees were known to be alive and living in the same area at the time of transmission) and if the transmitters were reliable. The scholars rejected as unreliable people reported to have lied (at any point), as well as people reputed to be stupid (and thus likely to misunderstand the saying), and sometimes ascetics (in Imam Malik's words, "an ascetic who doesn't know what he is narrating".) Sunni scholars regard affiliation to some extreme Shia ("Rafidi") and Qadariya sects as sometimes reducing a narrator's reliability, due to these sects' alleged propensity for fabricating hadith; Kharijites are seen as less likely to fabricate. However, they generally accept these narrators too as long as they were not engaged in actively spreading their views. Shi'a scholars, conversely, doubt the impartiality of the Sunni scholars, and privilege narrators known to have followed Ali and his descendants.

Hadith that were not thrown out as clearly spurious were usually sorted into three categories:

• "genuine" (sahih, the best category)
• "fair" (hasan, the middle category)
• "weak" (da'if).

Some of the sahih hadith were further distinguished as mutawatir, or agreed upon. The sayings or events reported in these hadith were attested by so many witnesses, though different isnads, that it was though inconceivable that these hadith could be forgeries.

Many contemporary Muslims who have not been trained in the sciences of hadith regard the collections of Bukhari and Muslim as particularly reliable, and tend to accept them as sure and certain. Trained Islamic scholars are much more likely to adopt a critical stance towards even the sahih collections, and caution that hadith have to be weighed and evaluated, not accepted as true without further consideration. Hence the MCSA collection of hadith, warns:

Shi'a Muslims also believe that training is required to evaluate hadith. In religious matters, lay Shi'a usually defer to the Shi'a clergy with the proper training, the mujtahid and marja.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "How hadith were collected and evaluated", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki