Hadith

Hadith is the Arabic word for a 'report' or an 'account [of an event]' and refers to the Islamic oral tradition of anecdotes containing the purported words, actions, and the silent approvals of the Islamic prophet Muhammad or his immediate circle (companions in Sunni Islam, Ahl al-Bayt in Shia Islam).

After being compiled in the 10th and 11th centuries, the Hadiths began to be imposed by socio-political and spiritual authorities as the original words of Muhammad from the 14th century onward. For many Muslim sects, hadith was a reliable source for religious and moral guidance known as sunnah, which ranks second to that of the Quran in authority, widely respected in mainstream Islamic thought, so that the majority of Sharia rules derived from hadith rather than the Quran. However, in the early Islamic society the use of hadith as it is understood today (documentation, isnads, etc.) came gradually. Sunnah originally meant a tradition that did not contain the definition of good and bad. Later, "good traditions" began to be referred to as sunnah and the concept of "Muhammad's sunnah" was established. Muhammad's sunnah gave way to the "hadiths of Muhammad" which were being transmitted orally, then recorded in the corpuses that continued to be collected, classified and purified according to various criteria in the following centuries. Scholars have categorized hadith based on their reliability, sorting them into classifications such as sahih ('authentic'), hasan ('good'), and da'if ('weak'). This classification is subjective to the person doing this study and differences in classification have led to variations in practices among the different Islamic schools and branches. The study of hadith is a central discipline in Islam, known as the hadith sciences, and is also examined in the contemporary historiographical field of hadith studies.

Statements attributed to Muhammad and used in various conversations in the period after his death, which circulated orally for several centuries, began to be compiled by Islamic scholars known as muhaddiths in the 7th-10th centuries. Each hadith is associated with a chain of narrators (isnad), a lineage of people who reportedly heard and repeated the hadith from which the source of the hadith can be traced. The authentication of hadith became a significant discipline, focusing on the isnad (chain of narrators) and matn (main text of the report). This process aimed to address contradictions and questionable statements within certain narrations. Due to the gap in oral information between the recorded dates of Muhammad's life and the dates when these written accounts began to appear in sources, the reliability of this information is highly debated in academic circles. A minority of Muslims criticise the hadith and reject them, including Quranists, who assert that Islamic guidance should rely solely on the Quran. They argue that many hadith are fabrications (pseudepigrapha) from the 8th and 9th centuries, falsely attributed to Muhammad. Historically, some sects of the Kharijites also rejected the hadiths, while Mu'tazilites rejected the hadiths as the basis for Islamic law, while at the same time accepting the Sunnah and Ijma.

Western scholars participating in the field of hadith studies are generally skeptical of the value of hadith for understanding the true historical Muhammad. Reasons for skepticism include the late compilation of hadith (often complied centuries after Muhammad's death), difficulties in verifying chains of transmission, the prevalence of hadith fabrication, and doubts about the traditional methods of hadith authentication. 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.