Origins of Hadith: An Oxford Scholar’s Analysis

Hadiths are sayings attributed to the prophet Muhammad. Sunni and Shia Muslims believe that all authentic (Sahih in Arabic) hadiths that are attributed to the prophet were transmitted faithfully from his companions and followers, without any corruption.

Growing up, how many of us have heard from the imams at our local mosques that reading Sahih Bukhari is exactly the same as hearing prophet Muhammad speak to you 1400 years ago, or that Bukhari is the second most authentic book in Islam after the Quran? I sure have, multiple times.

But when we examine the historical evidence, and the evidence from the Hadith collections themselves (such as Bukhari and Muslim), we realize that this is not true.

Here is a very brief overview of the origins of Hadith at least according to the best available historical evidence and the consensus of secular academic scholarship:

There were many Hadiths in circulation from anonymous, unknown sources, since the time of the prophet’s death. Mass-fabrication of Hadith for various reasons (polemical reasons, political reasons, advertisement, the need for entertainment and stories, etc.) lis believed to have occurred since the first few decades after prophet Muhammad’s death. Nobody at the time documented who told them information or where they heard information from.

After the prophet died, five distinct, often conflicting, regional traditions (Mecca, Medina, Kufa, Basrah, and Syria) gradually formed based on communal memory and inherited practices associated with certain followers and companions, rather than any sayings or narrations directly attributed to anyone. While Hadith reports were being transmitted and fabrication continued, Hadiths were not yet the main source of Islam for the Muslims at the time.

In the early Abbasid period (750-800 CE), regional jurists from the five regional traditions began to be more exposed to one another, causing more frequent debates over Islamic fiqh. They began to collect and fabricate Hadiths as weapons to use against each other in those debates, to make their position look correct over their rivals. They also took many Hadiths that were originally attributed to companions or followers, and attributed those Hadiths as narrations of prophet Muhammad, as the standard of evidence shifted more towards prophetical Hadiths.

In the process of jurists weaponizing Hadiths for debate purposes, isnads (chains of transmission) had to be hypothesized and estimated by jurists, because isnad documentation only became standard practice at around 100 AH (722 CE). As a result, the generations of transmitters before that time had to be guessed or otherwise omitted for each Hadith.

By the time the Hadith sciences formally developed (in the 9th century CE), it was already too late. Their methodology they employed to judge the authenticity of Hadiths relied on assuming that the hypothetical isnads attributed to those Hadiths are correct. Since the true isnads of Hadiths remain unknown, then Bukhari and Muslim’s methodology fails to differentiate between authentic and inauthentic Hadith.

For these key reasons, the consensus in the field of secular Hadith studies is that unlike the Quran, we cannot be sure whether the Hadiths in major Sunni collections like Bukhari and Muslim authentically are the words of prophet Muhammad. Almost every Hadith attributed to the prophet is viewed as warranting a high degree of skepticism at best, to outright rejection at worst.

One key academic disagreement in the subject of secular Hadith studies according to Dr. Little is between those who believe that a miniscule number of Hadith reports can at least be confidently traced back to some of the tabi’een like Urwah ibn Az-Zubayr if modern analytical methods are used, and those who believe that Hadith reports cannot even be confidently traced back to the tabi’een generation because the early oral transmission was too unstable. Another key disagreement is between whether the common links (the narrator to which all isnads converge, which is a phenomenon of the vast majority of Hadiths that are transmitted through multiple isnads) were fabricators of Hadith, or simply transmitted what they heard from someone else.

But all agree that even Sahih Hadiths cannot be confidently traced back to the prophet Muhammad himself.

The “Oxford Scholar” that I mentioned in the title is Dr. Joshua Little, who graduated from Oxford university with a PhD. in Middle Eastern studies. He is well known for his landmark PhD dissertation paper, where he applied an isnad-cum-matn analysis and geographical analysis to investigate the origin of the Hadith that claimed Aisha was 6 years old when prophet Muhammad married her, and 9 years old when he had sexual relations with her. Professor Christopher Melchert (one of the big names in the field of academic Hadith criticism) was his doctoral advisor.

His investigation caused him to discover that this Hadith was fabricated by Aisha’s grand-nephew Hisham ibn. Urwah while he lived in Kufa, and the most likely motive was to protect her image against the Shias (who primarily resided in Kufa) who were attacking her reputation and character.

As a follower of the Quran alone, I have at times been asked the question, “How could millions of Muslims and even the companions of the prophet be wrong for 1400 years be wrong and misguided about Hadith? If the Quran alone was the correct way, wouldn’t there be some recorded memory of the earliest Muslims following the Quran alone? Did the companions who spread the teachings of the prophet lie about him and attribute false teachings to him, whether intentionally or due to poor memory?“

My response had always been something like this: “Since the Quran says to follow the Quran alone, that has to be what the prophet did, hence the non-Quranic rules and regulations found in Hadith must be later fabrications attributed to him. How did such fabrications happen? I don’t know, maybe some companions lied, or maybe some companions had poor memory. Or maybe the people in the isnads after the companions somehow had faulty memory, therefore causing the prophet’s original sayings to be distorted over time before people like Bukhari developed Hadith sciences and recorded Hadiths in writing. Or maybe early Muslims mass-fabricated Hadiths and attributed them to the prophets and the companions. But I don’t know for sure.“

As you can see, my response to the apparent disconnect between Quran alone Islam and the Islam that most people believe was transmitted from the prophet’s companions and their followers was full of “maybe” and “I don’t know” or “we can’t say for sure.” There was legitimately no way I could have known because all I did was follow the Quran alone. I never did any in-depth investigations into the academic and historical literature.

So this is why commentary from an expert of Hadith history (Dr. Joshua Little) is important here. Through his own research and studying the academic literature, he learned that not only was there mass-fabrication of Hadith going on since early after the prophet’s death due to various sociocultural factors and the lack of early written documentation of Hadith, but that even the method used by Imams Bukhari and Muslim was not effective at distinguishing between fabricated material and what was authentically spoken by prophet Muhammad.

In other words, we get real answers from someone who did the hard work so that we do not have to. How nice!

Part 1: Mass-Fabrication of Hadith

To begin with, it is well known even in traditional Hadith scholarship that very soon after the prophet’s death, many people were fabricating Hadiths for a variety of reasons. Here is a report attributed to the jurist Shu’bah ibn al-Hajjaj, whom Dr. Little argues is the founder of Hadith sciences and Hadith textual criticism:

“Verily, you can barely find anyone [before me] scrutinizing these Hadith, [whose investigation was comparable to] my investigation, nor [anyone] whose search [for Hadith was comparable to] my search. I have examined it [i.e. Hadith in general] and discovered that not [even] a third thereof is sound.” – Shu’bah ibn. al-Hajjaj, translated by Dr. Little

Yahya ibn. Sa’id al-Qattan was a student of Shu’bah, and he said (as translated by Dr. Little) that many pious people (as-saliheen) were the most dishonest people in matters of Hadith. Most likely, Yahya is implying that the righteous people believed they are somehow benefitting Islam by inventing sayings in the prophet’s name:

“I have not seen the pious, in any regard, [being] more dishonest than they [are] in regards to Hadith.”

Another report from Egyptian Hadith scholar Abd. Allah ibn. Lahi’ah (d. 789-791) says that whenever jurists learned a doctrine of Islam through reasoning, they turned that doctrine into a Hadith:

“A heretic (rajul min al-ahwa) who had repented of his [false] doctrines spoke to me. He said: ‘Examine carefully from those whom you have taken these Hadith, for verily, whenever we reasoned our way to a doctrine, we would turn it into a Hadith.”

As for when the mass-fabrication of Hadiths occurred, here is what Dr. Joshua explains in Bottled Petrichor‘s podcast:

“After the prophet dies, stories about the prophet would continue to circulate, and so would some of his doctrines. Probably some of his doctrines were also being transmitted, but this transmission is anonymous. It’s not yet customary for people to cite sources. Things were being transmitted without people recording in every instance who they got it from. And at the same time, this [the era of conquest and the four rightly-guided caliphs] is an era of extreme mutation, elaboration, and distortion, right? Reports were being radically changed and reshaped and reinterpreted and reconstituted in the course of transmission.”

So what he is saying here is that the mass-fabrication originated very early into Islamic history, during the “conquest era” or the era of the first four caliphs, then continued onward in subsequent decades. There was no formalized documentation of Hadith or Hadith sciences at the time, and everything was being anonymously transmitted, which creates conditions needed for distortion.

Just to contextualize what Dr. Little means by this being an era of extreme mutation, it is worth noting that the Rashidun era is a very chaotic era. Umar, Uthman, and Ali (3 of the first 4 caliphs) got assassinated.

The first civil war occurred after Ali’s ascension as Caliph and ended with Ali’s assassination 5 years later.

The first Fitnah lead to the rise of different partisan and political groups such as Shia, Kharjites, Mu’tazilites, etc.

Additionally, the massive territorial expansion of the Islamic empire during the Rashidun era caused a huge influx of converts from different faiths and ethnic backgrounds such as Persian, Egyptian, Syrian, Roman, etc. And those converts brought with them new knowledge and ideas that did not exist in Arab society before. This may have played a role in forming the “Israiliyyaat” category of Hadiths for example.

All of these factors, and the fact that reports were being anonymously transmitted, created the right conditions for large-scale Hadith fabrication, whether accidental or purposefully.

Part 2: The Late Origin of Isnads

Sunnis respond. “Yes, we already know mass fabrication of Hadith took place. This is why the famous Hadith collectors like Bukhari and Muslim developed a methodology to let us know which Hadiths are the true words of the prophet.“

The problem here is that the criteria that they both used to judge a Hadith’s authenticity is isnad, which unfortunately is not proven fact. Rather, the isnad is largely the product of 8th century juristic guesswork and estimation.

So if Bukhari and Muslim centered their methodology on unproven isnads, can we really say that they successfully filtered out the authentic Hadiths from the forgeries? No, so that means there is a strong chance that the Hadiths found in Sahih Bukhari and Sahih Muslim are largely fabricated and did not come from the prophet.

Just to elaborate further, it is well known that the quality of the isnads (chain of transmitters) of each Hadith was the most important criterion for Hadith collectors like Imam Bukhari and Imam Muslim to decide whether a Hadith is authentic or not.

They both are regarded as the two most important Hadith collectors in Sunni Islam because of the sophisticated method they use to examine the isnads attributed to Hadiths, and determine therefrom what Hadith is authentic or not.

But according to Dr. Joshua Little, there is one glaring problem: it is a consensus in the academic scholarship that documenting isnad (transmission chains) was uncommon until decades after the Second Fitnah (680-692 CE).

People started documenting isnads during the Second Fitnah (which is already many decades after prophet Muhammad’s death), but Dr. Little says that it remained uncommon to do so until around 100 AH (which is 722 CE).

This means it was uncommon to document isnad until 90 years after prophet Muhammad died,

Dr. Little stated on Dr. Javed T. Hashmi’s podcast:

“So it’s basically now a consensus, as far as I can tell, within the secular critical scholarship that isnads first arose during the Second Fitnah, especially during or in reaction to the rebellion of al-Mukhtar in Kufah. And then subsequent to that, decades after that, they spread and became widespread and systematic.”

The evidence that Dr. Little cites for the origins of the isnad (when people started asking for it) is the following:

A report from Muhammad ibn. Sirin saying, “They did not used to ask for the isnad, but then when the fitnah occurred. they said, “Name for us your men.”

A report from Ibrahim al-Nakha’i saying, “The isnad was only asked for [beginning in] the days of al-Mukhtar.“

But even though isnad originated since al-Mukhtar’s rebellion (somewhere between 685 to 687 CE), the practice of citing isnad did not become normal or widespread until several decades later. Dr. Little cites the following evidence to explain why the academic scholarship has this view:

There is a report of the jurist Said ibn. Jubayr (b. 665 CE, d. 714 CE) getting angry when asked for an isnad, which is not the expected reaction if citing isnads was normal.

A report from Hammad ibn Salamah about his teacher, the famous scholar and Hadith narrator Qatadah ibn. Di’amah. (who died in 735-736 CE). He said Qatadah almost never cited an isnad until Hammad ibn. Abi Sulayman came and visited him in Basrah.

All of the major common links through which the attributed chains of transmissions flow (and Qatadah ibn. Di’amah himself is one of those common links) originated in the 8th century CE, which would be expected if that is the time when it became more common to document whom they heard Hadiths from.

Additionally, Malik’s Muwatta (written during the 8th century) contains more than 500 Hadiths, yet many of them lack a full isnad. Again, this would be expected if it was not common before the 8th century to document isnads.

This is extremely problematic because before documentation of isnads became common, Hadiths were anonymously transmitted. No one questioned whom narrators heard their hadiths from.

Hadith narrators were great at remembering who told them something, but they didn’t know who told the person who told them something, or who told the person that told the person that told them something, and so on.

Think about this: let’s say your mom told you that Julius Caesar was black. If, during your mom’s time, it was uncommon to cite sources, it is likely that your mom never told you who told her this information. Perhaps the person who told your mom did not tell your mom where he heard that information from, and so on.

So if, during your time, the people started demanding you to cite your sources for your narration, how are you going to prove who told your mom that Julius Caesar was black, if she didn’t tell you? How are you going to prove who told the person who told your mom that Julius Caesar was black? You have no choice but to guess if you want to fill in the transmission gaps between your mom and the person who made the original claim.

So in the absence of prior isnad documentation, major 8th century Hadith narrators and jurists like Qatadah had no choice but to use guesswork to estimate the isnads. That means while they know person A told them this information, they very likely had to estimate the identity of the person B who told person A, and the person C who told person B, and the person D that told person C, and so on, until the hypothesized transmission chain stops at the prophet Muhammad himself. At times, isnads were left incomplete due to the knowledge gap.

Why is this important? Once again, if the methodology of Hadith authentication relies heavily on the soundness of the isnad, and if isnad was just something that 8th century jurists and Hadith narrators theorized, then we don’t really know what the true isnad of these Hadiths are from the time of the prophet to the 8th century.

And if we don’t know the true isnads, then we cannot properly apply Bukhari’s method to determine the authenticity of any Hadith.

incomplete isnads

This is not discussed by Dr. Little, but this is a valid point discussed by the editor of Quran Talk Blog.

There is the issue of using the “adalat as-sahabah” (integrity of the companions) doctrine in Hadith sciences to authenticate Hadiths. This means that once a companion of the prophet appears in any isnad (chain of narrators), the Hadith is accepted as sahih without further need to investigate or name which person the companion heard that Hadith from.

For example, regarding one of the companions of the prophet, Abu Hurayrah, it is known that he heard many Hadiths from other companions and intermediaries, instead of directly from the prophet. It is the same with companions like ibn Abbas.

But Hadith science does not require listing which intermediaries between himself and the prophet that he heard a hadith from, because the word of a companion is automatically trusted.

Once a Hadith is believed to originate from a companion, it is treated as if that companion heard it directly from the prophet, even though that companion may have heard it from another companion, who may have heard it from another companion, and so on, rather than directly from the prophet himself. This is because of the doctrine of adalat as-sahabah where the integrity of all companions is not doubted or questions.

The problem with the “adalat as-sahabah” doctrine is that Surah 9 (which was among the last revealed Surahs, revealed very near the end of the prophet’s life) states that there are many hypocrites among the people around the prophet (his companions) that even he does not know, whether Bedouins or the Madinan people.

[9:101] And there are hypocrites around you among those who are of the Bedouins, as well as among the people of Madinah. They have been persistent in hypocrisy. You do not know them, We know them…

So even after the prophet died, hypocrites were still hidden amongst the companions.

Even if we accept the isnads attributed to Hadiths as factual rather than a product of juristic guesswork, the jurists tended not to fill in the transmission gaps between the prophet and the companion who transmitted a Hadith.

This is a major problem, because what if Abu Hurayrah, ibn Abbas, or someone else unknowingly transmitted a Hadith from a hidden hypocrite amongst the prophet’s companions? We have no way to know whether that is the case or not.

Part 3: The Five Regional Traditions

Joshua Little states that also find described and embodied in the earliest Hadith collections five distinct regional traditions: Meccan, Medinan, Kufan, Basran, and Syrian. Almost all Islamic knowledge available today came from these five centers, mostly from Medina and Kufa.

At the time, Hadith reports was not the primary way that people practiced Islam. Instead, there were these five established local methods of practice (also known as regional traditions) that the public inherited through communal memory. Those distinct regional traditions were associated with various companions (sahabah) and followers (tabi’een).

So instead of “according to the Hadith of the prophet, so-and-so is a haram act”, Islamic jurists (in Medina for example) used to say, “According to the Medinan custom/practice, doing such-and-such act is haram.”

Hadith (the sayings of the prophet or the companions) was not used by the five regional traditions to determine Islamic law. To them, Islamic law came from the inherited customs and practices that people believed or assumed to have originated from certain companions or followers.

There were very significant differences in Islamic doctrine between these five regional centers, as shown by the quote below:

Abd al-Rahman ibn. Amr al-Awza’i stated (with clarification brackets added by Dr. Little):

“Rejected [are the following]: amongst the doctrines of the People of Makkah, [their views on] temporary marriage (al-mu’tah) and the sale of currency (al-sarf); amongst the doctrines of the People of Madinah, [their views on] listening [to music] (al-sama) and [the permissibility of] anal sex with women (‘ityan al-nisa fi adbari-hinna); amongst the doctrines of the People of Syria, [their views on] determination (al-jabr) and obedience [to tyrants] (al-ta’ah); and amongst the doctrines of the People of Kufah, [their views on] [the permissibility of] [alcoholic] date wine (al-nabid) and the pre-dawn meal [during Ramadan] (al-sahur).”

So when did the jurists of the five regional traditions (regionalist jurists) start collecting and using Hadith as part of debates on Islamic law? Dr. Little on History Valley‘s podcast estimates that to have occurred around 750-800 CE. While narrations were being orally transmitted since before then, this time period marked a systematic effort by regionalist jurists to use Hadith as ammunition against other regional traditions and against opposition groups within a regional tradition.

“Moving into the early Abbasid period, the regional jurists are mostly citing followers, and to a lesser extent the companions, and least of all the prophet. They continue to cite local custom and consensus, which is actually becoming an overriding source of Sunnah, right? So, precisely how they’re actually evaluating reports is: “Does this conform with our local consensus?” And battles of ascription are occurring within or between the regional traditions, right? People are creating counter-hadiths against each other, right? And in particular, local opposition tendencies against the mainstream school of each region, they tend to try and cite [hadiths from] companions and the prophet, to try and trump the major regional schools which are mostly citing followers.” – Dr. Little, on History Valley

At times, Hadiths attributed directly the prophet were given less priority than the inherited local custom to the regional jurists, thus highlighting that Hadiths were not yet seen as overriding local customs and consensus.

In fact, Dr. Joshua Little points out an instance in Malik’s Muwatta, where Malik ibn. Anas (the founder of the Maliki madhhab) himself rejects a hadith attributed to the prophet (which later became known as Sahih) saying that a virgin must be asked for her consent to marry, in favor of the Medinan legal tradition which said that a virgin did not have to be asked for consent by her father before he marries her off to someone.

Malik ibn Anas cites the Hadith attributed to the prophet in his Muwatta prohibiting forced marriage. Then, he later writes that it is the Medinan legal custom for a father to marry off the virgin daughter without her consent, then Malik says that it is legally binding upon the virgin to accept whomever her father wants her to marry, even if she does not want, because that is what the local custom of Medina teaches.

Effectively, Malik ibn Anas is giving the Medinan legal tradition more priority over Hadiths attributed to prophet Muhammad.

So we learn that Muslim jurists did not initially use Hadith (whether from the prophet or his companions) to obtain Islamic law. To them, Islamic law was already derived from local customs. But as the five regions became more exposed to one another during the Abbasid period, there were more interregional debates happening amongst their scholars. Hadiths became very useful evidence to use in debates against one another and prove one another wrong.

As a result, from the historical literature, we learn that regionalist jurists at the time weaponized Hadith to win debates by transforming their own doctrines into Hadiths. One such report is the following from an Egyptian Hadith scholar Abd. Allah ibn. Lahi’ah (d. 789-791):

“A heretic (rajul min al-ahwa) who had repented of his [false] doctrines spoke to me. He said: ‘Examine carefully from those whom you have taken these Hadith, for verily, whenever we reasoned our way to a doctrine, we would turn it into a Hadith.”

According to Joshua Little, we find this phenomenon (fabricating Hadith to use as ammunition in inter-regional polemics) by examining early Musannaf hadith collections and the writings of early Islamic jurists like al-Shafi’i. The dominant stances of Islamic fiqh (jurisprudence) in one regional tradition will conflict with the dominant stances and positions of other regions, despite all of them citing Hadith from even the prophet himself to back up their positions. The prophet is cited as supporting multiple contradictory positions.

How can that be possible if the prophet transmitted his teachings to his companions, and if his companions transmitted exactly what he taught to their followers, without error? Was prophet Muhammad constantly contradicting himself when teaching Islam to his companions?

No, the simplest explanation is that sayings attributed to the prophet or his companions were collected and at times fabricated, then was used as polemical ammunition against rival regional traditions and (by opposition figures) against mainstream schools within each region since the early Abbasid period.

This phenomenon of transforming legal doctrines (which was formed through reasoning) into narrations attributed to the prophet or his companions may explain the existing contradictions over legal issues in the Sahih Hadith. While Bukhari, Muslim, and the others actively worked to remove Hadith reports from their collections when they contradicted other Hadith, some contradictions still remain, such as:

Can you breathe into a container that you drink from?
Can you drink water while standing?
Can you lie on your back and place one foot on top of another?
Is there a punishment for drinking alcohol?
Is cupping forbidden or permitted?
Is assassination permissible?
Is there a legal punishment for bestiality?

Also, due to the strong inter-regional and intra-regional conflicts over Islamic legal doctrine in the early Abbasid period (750-800 CE), people started placing more emphasis on prophetical Hadiths. This caused Hadiths to gradually be raised back to the prophet.

“Also in this time period [early Abbasid period], more and more – especially in this sort of competition within and between regions – Hadiths are being raised back to the prophet. And also, you know, there’s mass false creation occurring in general of Hadiths.” – Dr. Little, on History Valley

According to Dr. Joshua Little, if we look at the earliest available sources for Hadith and Islamic jurisprudence, we find that Hadiths that were cited the most were not Hadiths of the prophet. People were mostly citing followers, and companions of the prophet to a lesser extent.

This is important because the intra-regional and inter-regional polemics gave rise to a phenomenon in Hadith known as “raising” or “retrojection”, where many Hadiths that were commonly attributed to companions or followers were being re-ascribed as Hadiths of the prophet.

Retrojection is acknowledged even in Sunni Hadith scholarship, and the typical explanation given is that at the time, people didn’t feel the need to attribute Hadiths to the prophet. The words of the companions was seen as equivalent as the words of the prophet until more emphasis was later placed on the words of the prophet.

But the problem is: many retrojected Hadiths retained the exact same wording. Retrojection is nothing more than putting words into prophet Muhammad’s mouth that he never said or was never previously attributed to him, a shocking form of academic dishonesty especially when considering that it was committed by Islamic jurists.

Dr. Little said on History Valley’s channel, “Every time I investigate a set of Hadith – I’m not saying every single hadith, but I’m saying every single big set of Hadiths on a topic – I’m always finding examples of raisings. It happens over, and over, and over. It is incredibly widespread. There are cases of raised Hadiths that are judged to be Sahih and accepted by Hadith critics, but they are clearly raised. We can find parallel, unraised versions of the same Hadith.”

Example: DEbate on Forced Marriage

Dr. Little explains that there used to be a major legal debate amongst the regional traditions about forced marriage, whether it was permissible or not. All of them cited Hadiths attributed to the prophet for proof that their opinion was correct.

The Medinan and Basran traditions believed virgin women can be married off by their fathers without their consent.

The Kufan and Meccan tradition was against forced marriage.

The prophet was cited by these groups as both for forced marriage and against forced marriage.

What ultimately ends up entering the Sahih Hadith collections is the prophetical Hadith against forced marriage.

The problem is that, according to Dr. Little, the differences between the five regional traditions created competition between each of them. Each of them wants to prove one another wrong.

So one common habit was falsely ascribing Hadiths that agrees with one regional tradition to followers or companions that are often cited by another legal tradition, just to prove their tradition wrong.

Dr. Little states that for example, one region will cite a follower Hadith to support its point of view, then another region will cite a Hadith from the same follower, but showing that follower citing a companion of the prophet to support the opposite opinion.

Here is what Dr. Joshua Little stated about this topic on the podcast Bottled Petrichor:

“The prophet is being cited [by the five regional traditions] in every which way, in conformity with each region. And the same thing goes especially for ‘Umar, for example. The simple explanation there is: the people are falsely ascribing things to the prophet based on their competing regional perspective, right? Probably that’s a simpler explanation than the prophet constantly contradicting himself on every issue.”

Part 4: Problems with Hadith Sciences

According to Dr. Joshua Little, the primary method used to judge whether a Hadith is authentic or not is assessing the quality of isnads.

He says that transmitters of Hadith who were usually corroborated by a set of established transmitters would then be deemed reliable, whereas those who are often uncorroborated or even contradicted by that set of established transmitters would be deemed unreliable.

Uncorroborated Hadiths taken from one of the established transmitters may also be deemed as authentic.

One problem, according to Dr. Little (on Bottled Petrichior‘s podcast), is that the actual reasoning behind how the Hadith collectors (like Bukhari and Muslim) deem one transmitter as reliable or unreliable are absent from their works. How were the original set of established transmitters chosen, and why?

Dr. Little has examined the literature from early Hadith textual critics like Bukhari, Muslim, al-Daraqutni, and so on, but he has never seen any of them provide a methodology or reasoning that answers this question. Hence, Dr. Little suspects that most likely, they are using their intuition and subjective opinion to assume that a certain set of already established transmitters are reliable, allowing them to compare other transmitters with them.

Some scholars like al-Tabarani frequently said in their works, “so-and-so is isolated in his transmission” or, “this Hadith was not transmitted by anyone other than so-and-so”. But how does al-Tabarani know that? Dr. Little says he does not explain his reason, and that it’s absolutely possible that there are transmitters of the same Hadith that al-Tabarani is unaware of. So Dr. Little suspects al-Tabarani is using his subjective intuition here.

In general, according to Dr. Little, there is significant ambiguity and unresolved questions as to the methodology that early Hadith scholars use, which points towards them relying heavily on subjective intuition in their Hadith criticism methodology.

Common Links Weaken Hadith Reliability

Joseph Schacht and Gautier Juynboll discovered that for the vast majority of legal Hadiths that have multiple isnads attributed to them, all those isnads do not independently go back to the prophet.

Rather, when all those isnads are traced back, they tend to converge at an 8th or 9th century Hadith narrator such as Qatadah ibn. Di’amah, or ibn Shihab al-Zuhri. Those narrators are known as “common links”.

For example, imagine that al-Zuhri narrates a Hadith to several people, then those people transmit that Hadith to their students, and so on.

Multiple isnads of that Hadith diverge after al-Zuhri, but before al-Zuhri there is only a single isnad passing from him back to the prophet.

That makes al-Zuhri a “common link”. The reliability of any Hadith in which al-Zuhri functions as the common link depends on the reliability of al-Zuhri himself.

This is very suspicious. If the prophet taught a legal ruling publicly to many companions, why do so many legal hadiths appear to funnel through only a single companion in the isnads before being widespread through people like al-Zuhri or Qatadah?

You would expect legal rulings to have been more frequently and publicly taught by the prophet, rather than privately taught to only one companion who then becomes the only transmitter of this ruling from him.

Also, even if the prophet taught important legal rulings to only one companion, then why didn’t the companion transmit it to anyone else except one person? Why did the person who learned the legal ruling from the companion only transmit it to one person, and the cycle repeated until al-Zuhri (an 8th century Medinan jurist) heard it?

While the presence of common links do not automatically prove fabrication by itself, it causes difficulty in confidently tracing the Hadith back to the prophet, we know that the five regional traditions weaponized Hadith during al-Zuhri’s time, thus making fabrication a strong possibility.

Part 5: Conclusion

So from all of that, we learn that the following is going on:

Mass fabrication of Hadith facilitated by sociocultural upheaval and lack of early documentation since the First Fitnah

Lack of formal isnad documentation ongoing for decades after the prophet died, leading narrators to infer, guess, or otherwise omit narrators to present completed isnad chains.

Fabrication, raising, and weaponization of Hadiths by regional jurists during the early Abbasid Era for polemical and debate purposes.

It isn’t until the the 9th century that regionalism gets replaced by the idea that prophetical Hadiths (no matter whether it supports or disagrees with a regional tradition) should be the primary source of law alongside the Quran, rather than regional custom. This is known as the ahl al-hadith (People of Hadith) movement.

The period of “ahl al-Hadith” is when we see Hadith collectors like Bukhari and Muslim travel across the five regions to collect Hadith, then apply their Hadith criticism methodology to try and sort out the authentic from the inauthentic Hadiths.

The issue is that their methodology relies on the quality of the isnads fabricated by regional jurists, rather than the quality of the true isnads (which we cannot know due to very late isnad documentation).

As a result, the question of what an authentic Hadith of the prophet remains unresolved to this day.

This is unlike the Quran, which was committed into writing extremely early, hence has a high amount of traceability back to the prophet. The Birmingham manuscript is made of the earliest surviving written pages of Quranic text, and they are dated back to the time of prophet Muhammad with 95% confidence.

So this is the history of the origins of Hadith according to the research and investigations done by the historian Dr. Joshua Little.

references

You can click this link on Dr. Little’s blog here for the full list of references for his analysis on the origins of Hadith.

And below are the three YouTube podcasts (Javad T. Hashmi, History Valley, and Bottled Petrichor) from which I synthesized Dr. Little’s analysis on the origins of Hadith: