Campusalam

• Skip to main content
• Skip to main navigation
• Skip to search
• Skip to navigation for this section

Hadith in Arabic means ‘saying’ (plural ahadith, though many in English use 'hadith' as the plural as well). It refers to the reports of the sayings and actions of the Prophet (pbuh), the Sunnah. Because the Qur’an explicitly commands Muslims to obey the Prophet (pbuh) in legal and ritual matters, the Sunnah became one source of legislation in Islamic law. As the hadith are the written record of some of the Sunnah, they are very important and special consideration has been given to the methodology of collecting the sayings of the Prophet (pbuh) and other early Muslims, a process which took place over several hundred years.

The scholarly discipline of hadith criticism focuses on the chain of transmission (isnad) and the content of the text itself (matn). The assessment of the chain of reporters or isnad involves tracing the biographical studies of the series of those who reported and then recorded the tradition. The internal criticism involves checking the content of the saying for consistency with the Qur’an, with other hadith and historical consistency. For a hadith to be seen to be authentic, both matn and isnad need to be checked and verified. Depending on the findings of these various studies, a hadith would be classified as sahih (authentic; both isnad and matn has been checked), hasan (good), da’if (weak), and mawdu’ or batil (forged).

There are six main collections of Sunni hadith which have gained wide acceptance, and of these the Sahih Bukhari (d. 870) and the Sahih Muslim (d. 875) are the usually seen as most authoritative ones. The Shi'a also collect ahadith of the Imams as well as the Prophet (pbuh) and Companions. Some of the principal Shi'a sources of hadith include al-Kulayni, al-Qummi and al-Tusi.

Many speak of the Sunnah and hadith as if they are exactly the same thing. It has recently been argued by Yasin Dutton, working on the texts of the legal scholar Sheikh Malik ibn Anas al-Asbahi, that we should remember that the Sunnah is broader than the hadith and we should not overlook the 'amal, the lived tradition, that was not always embodied in particular sayings. See Yasin Dutton, The Origins of Islamic Law: The Qurʼan, the Muwaṭṭaʼ and Madinan ʻAmal, Routledge Curzon, 2002.