Hadith studies

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Related topics Ahl al-Hadith Criticism Sheikh al-Hadith
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Hadith studies is the academic study of hadith, (i.e. what most Muslims believe to be a record of the words, actions, and the silent approval of the Islamic prophet Muhammad as transmitted through chains of narrators).^[1] While Muslim religious scholars had developed a practice aimed towards parsing between reports about Muhammad to determine which ones are authentic (and therefore legally and ethically actionable) and inauthentic, known in tradition as the hadith sciences, academics have begun to approach hadith from a secular point of view which did not assume any legitimate hadith had been successfully passed down. At least one major complaint that Western scholars had with the traditional hadith sciences was that it was almost entirely focused on scrutinizing the chain of transmittors (isnad) rather than the actual contents of the hadith (matn), and that scrutiny of isnad alone cannot determine the authenticity of a hadith.^[2] The most advanced method in modern hadith studies that seeks to trace the origins and developmental stages of hadith traditions across time, isnad-cum-matn analysis (ICMA), relies on the ability to correlate information from both the content and chain across multiple versions of a report recorded across multiple collections.^[3]

For much of the twentieth century, hadith studies has been occupied by the question of "authenticity", namely whether a hadith tradition represents a reliable historical account or if it originated later (and if it originated later, when, by whom, in what circumstances, etc.). More recently, the scope of the field has broadened to also address questions such as what role hadith played in the intellectual and social histories of Muslim societies.^[4]