Introduction to Hadith:
The “Traditions” of the
Prophet Muhammad
- Introduction
- Hadith
Components
- Evaluation
Criteria
- Hadith
Classifications
Introduction:
As the final Messenger of Allah, Muhammad has a special place in the
history and culture of Islam. Not only was Muhammad the leader of the Muslim
community, and the vehicle through whom the Qur`an was revealed, but he was
also considered, by virtue of his status as a Messenger of God, to be close to
God and to be a suitable model for human behavior. Because of this, Muhammad’s
leadership guided the community while he was alive, but his example was believed
to be normative long after his death. Given this importance, the Muslim
community recorded his words and actions for posterity, and as the number of
these reported conversations grew exponentially in the century after his death,
the community developed sophisticated methods for evaluating their
veracity. Since these Hadith were an important source for the
development of Islamic law, the community had to know which traditions were
reliable, and which were clearly fraudulent. The two most important
compiler/evaluators were Bukhari (d. 870 CE) and Muslim (d. 875), although four
other collections are accepted by all Sunni Muslims (by al-Tirmidhi, Abu Da’ud
al-Sijistani, al-Nasa’I, and Ibh Majah).
Hadith Components
A
Hadith is composed of two major parts, the text (which gave the actual
content) and the chain of transmission (which named the people who had
reported this, going back to the time of the Prophet.
A.
Text (matn)
The text or matn gave the actual account of the Prophet’s words or
behavior (“The Prophet said….”). A
particular Hadith’s text was usually not questioned in itself, unless it was
contradicted by a more authoritative source--either the Qur`an, or a
better-attested Hadith. |
B.
Chain of Transmission (isnad)
The
reliability of Hadith were usually judged by evaluating the chain of
transmission, according to the criteria below.
|
Evaluating Hadith:
Criteria include
A. The source to
whom attributed
1. Allah (Hadith Qudsi): A limited number of sayings are
attributed directly to Allah, and relayed through the Prophet Muhammad
2. Muhammad: Reports a narration from the Prophet
himself (e.g., “the Prophet said…”)
3. Companion: Reports a narration from a companion alone
(e.g., “we were told to…”). This is less authoritative, but still eyewitness
experience.
4. Successor: Narrator comes a time after the
Prophet. These cannot be authoritative, since these people could not have had
direct contact with the Prophet.
|
B. The Number of Reporters in each Generation
1.
Multiple Reporters: If many people in each generation report and
transmit an identical Hadith, it is unlikely that they could have all
colluded to support a false Hadith, and thus this Hadith is deemed reliable,
unless the Hadith contradicts the teaching of the Qur'an or a better-attested
Hadith. Hadith with multiple reporters in every generation seem to have been
uncommon.
2.
A Few Reporters in one or More Generations: In cases when only a few people
(or in the extreme case, one person) in a generation report a Hadith, it must
be examined with greater care, since fewer people attest to it. Here the
examiners focused on the character of the speaker(s)--in particular, whether
they were pious and learned, trustworthy, and whether they had good
memories--in short, whether they would have been able to understand what they
said, and to transmit it unchanged. If all of these were true, the traditions
can still be reliable, but if any of these are deficient, the tradition is
much weaker.
|
C. Links of the Isnad
1.
"Supported": The most authoritative. This is a Hadith reported by a
person who learned it from a teacher at an age suitable for learning, who had
learned it from his teacher (etc.)…. who heard it from a Companion of the
Prophet, who reported it of the Prophet himself. This is authoritative for
reporting the Prophet’s actual words and deeds.
2. “Continuous”: a Hadith with an
uninterrupted chain of transmission back only to a companion of the Prophet.
The
other types of isnad (all invalid) all omit one or another of the people
somewhere in this chain between the reporter and the Prophet—and this
omission means that the direct link back to Prophet has been broken.
|
Final Hadith Classifications
Except for the rejected Hadith at far right, these classifications
reflect the probability that these Hadith are genuine,
and do not presume to tell w/certainty.
A. Sahih (“exact”)
Sahih Hadith (the most reliable)
are of two sorts:
1.
If the isnad has many transmitters in every single generation.
2.
If a Hadith with an unbroken isnad has only a few transmitters (one,
two, etc.) in any generation, it is reliable if and only if the
transmitters were pious Muslims, truthful, reliable, of an age to understand
exactly what they were learning, and reported the Hadith’s text verbatim.
|
B.
Hasan (“Fair”)
Hasan
Hadith are less reliable than the Sahih Hadith.
These
are Hadith in which the isnad is reliable and unambiguous, but the
tradition is not as strong as for a Sahih Hadith
|
C. Daif
(“Weak”)
These
are unreliable traditions, either because
1.
The isnad is interrupted, and thus the chain of eyewitness testimony
does not go all the way back to the Prophet, OR
2.
One or more of the reporters is considered unreliable (e.g., lacking true
piety, being a liar, drinking alcohol, poor memory, or any other factor impugning
that person's testimony).
|
D. Rejected
Munkar
(“denounced)”
A
Hadith reported by a weak narrator, whose content runs counter to a better-attested
Hadith; this has no authority, and is denounced.
Maudu
(“forged”)
This
clearly has no authority.
|
One
of the sub-disciplines of Hadith criticism was extensive biographical information
for the people mentioned in the Hadith.
One reason for this was to list the “character” factors that would be
necessary to be a reliable transmitter, but the biographies also listed
biographical information about people’s eras and native places, contacts,
travels, and personal habits. These
latter were done to help establish an unbroken isnad, since if a Hadith
claimed that Person A had learned it from person B, but if these two people did
not live in the same era or in the same place, that Hadith was clearly
unreliable. The energy and vigor that
the early Muslim community put into this is a clear sign of how important
“getting this right” was to them.
Acknowledgements:
The Arabic terms here (since I know very little Arabic) come from “The Science
of Hadith,” an article from Perspectives posted on the USC Islamic
server at
http://www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/fundamentals/hadithsunnah/scienceofhadith/brief1/. Other information (primarily historical
background) comes from chapter nine in Frederic Denny’s An Introduction to
Islam (New York: Macmillan, 1994).
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