Authenticating Hadith and the History of Hadith Criticism
بِسْمِ اللهِ الرَّحْمٰنِ الرَّحِيْمِ
Preface
The following is (mostly) an extract from my Book hadith:Muhammad’s legacy in the medieval and modern world (one world,2017). I have taken this opportunity to add some material as well, especially in light of debates over hadith reliability that I have seen take place since this book was published.
Introduction: Reporters then and now
Arabic and English textbooks introducing Islamic methods of hadith criticism begin with presenting the complex technical vocabulary (muṣṭalaḥāt) of hadith critics as it was formalized after the thirteenth century. These books assume that by learning this set of terms students will understand how hadith criticism operated in the early Islamic period when scholars like al-Bukhārī and Muslim were compiling their Ṣaḥīḥs. In reality, however, the critical methods of early Muslim hadith scholars were diametrically opposed to this later, rigid description. Theirs was an intuitive and commonsense way of trying to determine whether a report could be reliably attributed to a source or not—a method not unlike those employed by modern investigative reporters. To set the stage for our study of how Muslims tried to sift reliable from unreliable ‘reports’ from the Prophet ﷺ, let us imagine a journalist working today.
If our reporter tells her editor that she has a major story about a senior political figure, the editor will ask her two questions: who is your source, and is your source corroborated? How could our reporter reply? She knows that certain sources are reliable for certain information. If the president’s spokesperson announces that the president will make a visit to the UK, there is no need to double-check this information. Imagine, however, that the reporter has found a source who gives her rare and valuable information about an important issue but whom she as yet has no reason to trust. Our reporter is not going to stake her journalistic reputation on this one tip, but how does she determine the accuracy of her source’s information?
Imagine that this source tells her that there has just been an earthquake in China. Our reporter would call her contacts in China to confirm. If these contacts tell her that indeed a quake had occurred, the source has been proven correct. If no one she spoke to had noticed anything, the source’s story would be uncorroborated and our reporter would conclude that the source was unreliable. Suppose that next the source tells our reporter valuable information about the condition of the country’s economy. Again, our reporter proceeds cautiously, so she conducts thorough research and finds that the source’s information was correct. The source provides tips on a few more stories, and after checking out the information, our reporter finds that these stories are true as well. Eventually our reporter concludes that this source is reliable, and if the source provides a tip on a hot story in the future, the reporter will feel comfortable writing her story based on the source’s testimony alone.
Reporters understand that the reliability of a source is based upon the accuracy of the information they provide. The best way to confirm the accuracy of a source is to check with other sources who have access to the same information and see if they agree. Corroboration “is what turns a tip into a story.”
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These two pillars of modern journalism, the reliability of a source and determining the reliability of a source or story through corroboration, are familiar to us all in our daily lives. We all know people who pass on information reliably and others who tend to forget, lie, or exaggerate. We all instinctively seek out corroboration and know when it matters and when it does not. If a student is absent for a day of class in university and hears from a classmate that the professor has changed the date of the final exam, they will not be content to take the word of just one classmate; the student will ask other students who were also in that class. If no other students heard the professor make that announcement, they will have serious doubts about the information.
Another fact is equally evident to us in our daily lives: the contents of reports we hear have a strong influence on our view of their reliability and our confidence in their transmitters. If our reporter met a source who swore that he had seen a herd of flying elephants downtown, she would probably both disbelieve him and consider him unreliable from that point on. There are generally accepted standards of what is possible and impossible. Furthermore, we all have a sense of what is important information and what is not, and we treat this information accordingly. If our reporter hears a rumor that the president is about to announce a major change in the government’s economic policy, she will want to verify this information before writing her story. If she hears that the president has changed his favorite dessert from ice cream to angel-food cake, she will probably be content to cite this information as is.
We must remember, however, that such notions of what is possible or impossible, important or unimportant, are culturally determined, and as such they may differ with time and place. If, in 1990, a student had come to class holding a small device they claimed contained any piece of music, information, or published material one could think of, the professor would have called them delusional. Today professors compete daily for attention with such devices. If a professor in the US claimed to have eaten a great dog meat dinner at a specialized dog meat restaurant, students would think this was a disgusting joke. But if the professor had just flown in from China, where dog meat has long been “a minor but regular part of the diet” and where an annual dog meat festival is held, he might be telling the truth.
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While modern reporters are charged with determining the veracity of stories about what is happening in the world today on the basis of contemporary sources, the architects of the Islamic hadith tradition were faced with a more daunting task: they had to establish a system of distinguishing between true and false stories about a man who had lived over a century earlier and whose revered status cast a commanding shadow over the entire Islamic tradition.
In this paper we discuss the origins, mechanics, and development of Sunni hadith criticism. We divide its history into two periods: early hadith criticism, roughly 720–1000 CE, and later hadith criticism, from roughly 1000 CE to today. This is a study of Muslim scholarship, so notions of ‘authenticity’ and ‘forgery’ mentioned here refer to the judgment of Muslim scholars of hadith and not necessarily to the methods of modern Western historians (see thing paper for more on the Western historical-critical method).
The problem of hadith forgery
The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ is the single most dominant figure in the Islamic religious and legal tradition. From the time of his emigration to Medina to debates over Islam today, to disobey directly his established teachings has been to place oneself outside the Muslim community. Because the Prophet possessed such eminent authority, early Muslims looked to his legacy to support or legitimize their different schools of thought, beliefs, or political agendas. It seems that even during the Prophet’s own lifetime he understood that people could misrepresent him. In one report, a man claiming to be the Prophet’s representative established himself as the mayor of a small town in Arabia until the Prophet uncovered his hoax and punished him.
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One of the first crises to afflict the Muslim community after the Prophet’s death—the question of who would succeed him as religious and political leader—revolved around competing claims about the Prophet’s words. The supporters of ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib argued that the Prophet ﷺ had announced him as his successor, while those who affirmed the successive caliphates of Abū Bakr, ʿUmar, and ʿUthmān did not. In this and many other Islamic sectarian and political disagreements, all sides agreed on what the Prophet had said but disagreed on its implications. Both Sunnis and Shiites, for example, agreed that the Prophet had said that ʿAlī was to him what Aaron was to Moses, but they disagreed on whether that meant that ʿAlī should succeed the Prophet politically.
Actually forging reports about the Prophet ﷺ also quickly became a problem. When civil war broke out openly between ʿAlī, then the fourth caliph to succeed the Prophet, and the then governor of Syria and future founder of the Umayyad dynasty, Muʿāwiyah ibn Abī Sufyān, both sides waged a propaganda war using the Prophet’s words as ammunition. ʿAlī’s supporters falsely claimed that Muhammad ﷺ had said, “If you see Muʿāwiyah ascend my pulpit, then kill him,” while Muʿāwiyah’s side countered by forging hadiths such as “It is as if Muʿāwiyah were sent as a prophet because of his forbearance and his having been entrusted with God’s word” (Muʿāwiyah had served as one of the Prophet’s scribes).
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There are even reports from the early historian al-Madā’inī (d. 228/843) that Muʿāwiyah encouraged the systematic forging and circulation of hadiths affirming the virtues of the other caliphs and Companions at ʿAlī’s expense (then again, these reports about Mu‘āwiya might have been made up by his opponents).
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In light of how quickly the Prophet’s legacy became a tool to be manipulated by vying parties among Muslims, we should not be surprised at the veritable slogan of Muslim hadith criticism. It is the most widely transmitted hadith in all of Islam, with Muslim scholars counting between sixty and a hundred Companions transmitting it from the Prophet ﷺ: “Whoever mispresents me intentionally, let him prepare for himself a seat in Hellfire.”
During the lifetime of leading Companions like ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb, ʿAbd Allāh ibn Masʿūd, or Anas ibn Mālik, many of whom had been with the Prophet ﷺ since his early days in Mecca, it was difficult to attribute something untrue to the Prophet without a senior Companion noticing. In fact, there are many reports documenting the Companions’ vigilance against misrepresentations of the Prophet’s legacy. ʿAlī is quoted as requiring an oath from any Companion who told him a hadith from the Prophet that he himself had not heard.
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When the Companion Abū Mūsá al-Ashʿarī told ʿUmar that the Prophet had said that if you knocked on someone’s door three times and they did not answer you should depart, ʿUmar demanded that he find another Companion to corroborate the report.
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On a number of occasions after the Prophet’s death, his wife ʿĀʾishah objected to hadiths that other Companions related. She rejected Ibn ʿUmar’s statement that the Prophet ﷺ warned mourners that a dead relative would be punished for his family’s excessive mourning over him because she believed that it violated the Qur’anic principle that “No bearer of burdens bears the burdens of another” (Qur’an 53:38).
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Sometimes she corrected Companions who had misunderstood what the Prophet had said. Abū Hurayrah quoted the Prophet as saying that women, beasts, and houses could be bad omens. When Aisha heard this she “split in half in anger,” exclaiming that the Prophet had mentioned this, but only to explain that it was a pre-Islamic superstition condemned by the Qur’an.
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Abū Hurayrah’s extensive efforts at hadith collection in particular drew the ire and concern of some leading Companions. There is one report that ʿUmar bin al-Khaṭṭāb told him, “Indeed, I say let the Prophet’s words alone or indeed I’ll send you back to the lands of [your tribe] Daws!”
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We should remember that anxiety over excessive or careless interest in collecting hadith in no way meant that the Companions did not consider the Sunnah of the Prophet authoritative (the Sunnah being the Prophet’s authoritative precedent as a whole, with individual hadiths being pieces of information telling us about that Sunnah). And they had no problem writing hadith down when necessary; as caliph, Abū Bakr sent Anas, then a regional governor, a document with the Prophet’s commands regarding Zakat collection. ʿUmar might ask for corroboration and Aisha might object that someone had misunderstood a hadith, but this was not skepticism about hadith in general. When ʿUmar warned other Companions to “Be frugal in narrating from the Prophet of God,” early Muslim scholars understood this meant not obsessing about collecting stories about his battles and campaigns. It was not an objection to collecting hadith on law, ethics, and belief.
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Hadith forgery emerged as a blatant problem when the generation of Muslims who had known the Prophet ﷺ well died off. With the death of the last major Companion, Anas ibn Mālik, in Basra in 93/711 (the last Companion to die was Abū al-Ṭufayl ʿĀmir ibn Wāthilah, who died between 100/718 and 110/728), lies about the Prophet quickly multiplied. It is especially in the generation of the Successors that we begin seeing notebooks (ṣaḥīfahs) of hadiths, many supposedly narrated from Anas, filled with forged hadiths of a highly partisan or controversial nature.
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From that point onward, the forgery of hadiths would be a consistent problem in Islamic civilization. The heyday of hadith forgery was the first four hundred years of Islamic history, when major hadith collections were still being compiled. As compilation ended, by the late 1100s any alleged hadith that entered circulation that had not already been recorded in some existing book was automatically deemed a forgery. In the great urban centers of Mamluk Cairo or Ottoman Istanbul in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the masses might mistakenly think that a popular saying such as “The Muslim community is sinful but its Lord is most forgiving (ummah mudhnibah wa-rabb ghafūr)” was said by the Prophet ﷺ, but in general hadith forgery had run its course.
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Political and sectarian conflicts were a major engine for hadith forgery. All the major political conflicts in classical Islamic history were accompanied by hadiths forged for propagandistic purposes. The Prophet’s access to knowledge of the future provided endless possibilities in this realm. In one hadith, the Prophet ﷺ supposedly tells his uncle ʿAbbās, progenitor of the Abbasid dynasty, to look at the stars. The Prophet foretells, “From your descendents a number like the number of the Pleiades will rule the Muslim community.”
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In one forged pro-Shiite hadith, the Prophet predicts that “al-Ḥusayn will be killed sixty years after my emigration to Medina,” referring to the Umayyad caliph’s massacre of the Prophet’s grandson at Karbala in 61/680.
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In the twelfth century, an opponent of the Seljuq Turkish sultan Sanjar forged a hadith in which the Prophet predicted that, “Sanjar will be the last of the non-Arab kings; he will live eighty years and then die of hunger.”
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In fact, in the early 1990s one Arab scholar claimed that he had found an old manuscript with a hadith predicting that “A leader whose name is derived from the word ‘tree’ [Bush, perhaps?] will invade and liberate a small hill fort (in Arabic, ‘Kuwait’).”
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Many hadiths were also forged in legal and theological debates. Here the Sunni/Shiite schism once again has certainly produced the largest numbers of propagandistic hadiths. Less well-known conflicts have also yielded countless forgeries. In the first half of the ninth century, when the Abbasid caliphate was trying to impose its rationalist beliefs on Sunni scholars like Ibn Ḥanbal by torturing or imprisoning anyone who would not uphold the belief that the Qur’an was God’s created word and not an eternal part of His essence, pro-Sunni hadiths conveniently appeared in which the Prophet ﷺ said, “Whoever dies believing the Qur’an is created will meet God on Judgment Day with his head up his rear-end.” In eighth-century debates over whether Muslims could wear pants as opposed to robes, a hadith appeared in which the Prophet said, “O people, take pants as clothing, for indeed they are the most modest of clothes, especially for your women when they leave the house.”
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As legal schools solidified and competed with one another, forged hadiths appeared with statements such as “There will be in my community a man named Abū Ḥanīfah, and he will be its lamp… and there will be in my community a man named Muhammad ibn Idrīs [al-Shāfiʿī] whose strife is more harmful than that of Satan.”
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Hadiths were forged to give voice to all sorts of chauvinisms. Some were virulently racist, such as a forged hadith saying “The black African, when he eats his fill he fornicates, and when he gets hungry he steals (al-zanjī idha shabiʿa zanā wa-idhā jāʿa saraqa).”
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Others voiced civic pride, such as the hadith “[The city of] Askalon [near modern-day Gaza] is one of the two Brides, from there God will resurrect people on the Day of Judgment (ʿAsqalān iḥdá al-ʿarūsayn …)” or a whole Forty Hadith collection that one Aḥmad ibn Muhammad al-Marwazī (d. 323/934–5) forged about the virtues of the Iranian city of Qazvin.
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Another major source of forged hadiths was the popular story-tellers (qāṣṣ, pl. quṣṣāṣ) who entertained crowds on the streets of metropolises like Baghdad. These storytellers would attribute Jewish, Christian, or ancient Persian lore to the Prophet ﷺ. In one fantastic story, someone named Isḥāq ibn Bishr al-Kāhilī from Kufa told of the Prophet meeting an old man in the desert. The man claimed to be named Hāma, the great-grandson of Satan, and to have been alive since the days of Cain and Abel. In an account resembling a Rolling Stones song, he proceeds to tell Muhammad how he had met all the great prophets, from Noah to Jacob and Joseph. Moses had taught him the Torah, and Jesus had told him to convey his greetings to Muhammad, the messenger to come.
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A surprisingly large number of hadiths were forged and circulated by pious but misguided Muslims in an effort to motivate those around them both religiously and morally. One Abū ʿIṣmah was asked by his contemporaries to explain how the hadiths he narrated from ʿIkrimah, the disciple of the Companion Ibn ʿAbbās, about the virtues of reading different chapters of the Qur’an, were not narrated by any of ʿIkrimah’s other students. He replied that he had seen the people becoming obsessed with the legal scholarship of Abū Ḥanīfah and the Sīrah of Ibn Isḥāq. He had forged these hadiths to try and steer people once again towards the Qur’an.
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Many of those who forged hadiths for these pious purposes were themselves revered saintly figures. The famous hadith critic Yaḥyá ibn Saʿīd al-Qaṭṭān (d. 198/813) once said, “I have not witnessed lying [about the Prophet] in anyone more than I have seen it in those known for asceticism and piety.”
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A venerated saint of Baghdad, Ghulām Khalīl, was so beloved that on the day he died in 275/888-9 the markets of the city shut down. Yet when he was questioned about some dubious hadiths he narrated concerning righteous behavior, Ghulām Khalīl replied, “We forged these so that we could soften and improve the hearts of the populace.”
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Certainly pious figures such as Ghulām Khalīl or the scholars of religious law understood the enormity of the sin of lying about their Prophet ﷺ. How could they have contradicted their own mission of preserving his authentic teachings by doing so? Pious figures sometimes replied that the Prophet had forbidden the Muslims to lie about him, whereas they were lying for him. In the case of those early jurists who forged legal hadiths to support their school of law, it seems that they saw no contradiction between their actions and their commitment to preserving the Prophet’s teachings. After all, as one famous hadith put it, “The scholars are the inheritors of the prophets (al-ʿulamāʾ warathat al-anbiyāʾ).” It was the scholars who interpreted the message of Islam as it faced new challenges and circumstances. Phrasing their conclusions about proper acts or beliefs in the formula of ‘the Prophet said…’ was simply neatly packaging their authority as Muhammad’s representatives. As one early jurist explained, “When we arrived at an opinion through reasoning we made it into a hadith.”
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Hadith critics, of course, found such excuses reprehensible. Not all forgery of hadiths was a malicious act. Early transmitters sometimes confused the opinions or statements of Companions with Prophetic hadiths, such as Ibn Masʿūd’s saying, “Whatever the Muslims see as good is good according to God,” which was sometimes wrongly attributed to the Prophet ﷺ. Sometimes the comments of one of the hadith’s transmitters could be accidentally written as part of the hadith, a phenomenon that Muslim critics called idrāj (interpolation). Ibn ʿUyaynah (d. 196/811) narrated a hadith that the Prophet would seek refuge with God from four things: unbearable hardship, encountering misfortune, an evil fate, and the triumph of enemies. But he noted that the original hadith had only listed three things, “but I added one, and I do not know which one it is.”
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Often the words of scholars or saintly figures or simply popular sayings could be accidentally elevated to the status of Prophetic hadiths. The saying “The love of the earthly life is the start of every sin (ḥubb al-dunyā raʾs kull khaṭīʾah)” was generally attributed to Jesus until it became confused with a Prophetic hadith.
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A legal principle used by Muslim jurists, “Necessities render the forbidden permissible (al-ḍarūrīyāt tubīḥu al-maḥẓūrāt)” was also accidentally attributed to Muhammad ﷺ.
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In the ninth century a hadith appeared saying “Beware of flowers growing in manure, namely a beautiful woman from a bad family (iyyākum wa khaḍrāʾ al-diman …).” In this period another supposed hadith surfaced that “Whoever says something then sneezes, what he says is true (man ḥaddatha hadīthan fa-ʿaṭasa ʿindahu fa-huwa ḥaqq).” Neither report had any basis in Prophetic hadiths.
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Forgery of isnāds
Hadith forgery was not limited to inventing Prophetic sayings or attributing existing maxims to Muhammad ﷺ. In light of the importance of the isnād to accessing authority in the Islamic tradition, isnād forgery was arguably more common than matn forgery. Equipping existing hadiths with one’s own isnāds or constructing entirely new chains of transmission was known as ‘stealing hadiths (sariqat al-ḥadīth)’ or ‘rigging isnāds (tarkīb al-asānīd).’
Today no one would look askance at someone who cited a hadith without mentioning its isnād. In the early Islamic period, however, ahl al-ḥadīth scholars or those who debated them could not cite a hadith without providing their own isnād for the report. A scholar who had heard about a hadith without a firm isnād or from a transmitter considered unreliable by the ahl al-ḥadīth critics could thus not credibly present his hadith in any discussion. Forging a new isnād offered a solution. ʿAmr ibn ʿUbayd (d. 144/761), who belonged to the Muslim rationalist camp known as the Muʿtazilites, whom the ahl al-ḥadīth considered their mortal enemies, was thus attacked for lying in his narration of the hadith “He who carries weapons against us [Muslims] is not one of us (man ḥamala ʿalaynā al-silāḥ fa-laysa minnā)” from his teacher al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī, from the Prophet ﷺ. This hadith was well known as authentic among the ahl al-ḥadīth. The problem was that al-Ḥasan had not actually transmitted this from the Prophet. ʿAmr ibn ʿUbayd had heard of the report somewhere else and then tried to use it to support the Muʿtazilite position that committing grave sins assured Muslims a place in hell. But he did not have his own isnād for it. So he manufactured one from his teacher al-Hasan so that he could use it in debates.
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27The second major motivation to forge an isnād for an existing hadith was to bolster its reliability by increasing evidence of its transmission. According to the great hadith critic of Baghdad, al-Dāraquṭnī (d. 385/995), a whole notebook of hadiths praising human reason (ʿaql) was forged by Maysarah ibn ʿAbd Rabbihi. This book was then taken by Dāwūd al-Muḥabbir, who equipped the reports with his own new isnāds. One ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz ibn Abī Rajāʾ then stole these hadiths and provided them a new set of isnāds. Sulaymān bin ʿĪsá al-Sinjarī then did the same. A person who came across the hadiths in this book therefore could find four different sets of isnāds leading to four different scholars for hadiths that were in fact total forgeries.
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Especially in the tenth century and afterwards, when rare and elevated isnāds assumed a particular value among hadith collectors, disingenuous scholars could forge isnāds with these characteristics. The famous—if totally uncritical—hadith collector al-Ṭabarānī (d. 360/971) narrated a hadith via the impossibly short isnād of three people to the Prophet: Jaʿfar ibn Hamīd al-Anṣārī, from ʿUmar ibn Abān, from Anas ibn Mālik, from the Prophet ﷺ. The fact that al-Ṭabarānī was the only hadith scholar to narrate from the transmitter Jaʿfar ibn Hamīd strongly suggests that this Jaʿfar might have been a purveyor of forged elevated isnāds, which a collector like al-Ṭabarānī would have found irresistible.
The development of early Sunni hadith criticism: The three-tiered method
As false attributions to the Prophet ﷺ multiplied in the late seventh century, how were those Muslims who sought to preserve his authentic legacy to distinguish between true and forged hadiths? While the ahl al-raʾy scholars in Iraqi cities like Kufa attempted to rise above the flood of forged hadiths by depending on the Qur’an, well-established hadiths, and their own legal reasoning, the school that would give birth to the Sunni tradition, the ahl al-ḥadīth, evolved the three-tiered approach to determining the authenticity of a hadith. The first tier was demanding a source (isnād) for the report, the second was evaluating the reliability of that source, and the third was seeking corroboration for the hadith.
The processes of this three-tiered critical method did not emerge fully until the mid eighth century with critics like Mālik (d. 179/795) and Shuʿbah ibn al-Ḥajjāj (d. 160/776). Certainly, Successors like al-Zuhrī (d. 124/742) and even Companions had examined critically material they heard attributed to the Prophet ﷺ. Moreover, the critical opinions of Successors would inform later hadith critics. A formalized system of requiring isnāds and investigating them according to agreed conventions and through a set of technical terms, however, did not appear until the time of Mālik.
Step one: The isnād
The isnād, or ‘support,’ was the essential building-block of the hadith critical method. So essential would the isnād be to the Sunni science of hadith criticism that it became the veritable symbol of the ‘cult of authenticity’ that is Sunni Islam. One of the most oft-repeated slogans among hadith critics comes from the famous scholar Ibn al-Mubārak (d. 181/797), who said, “The isnād is part of religion; if not for the isnād, whoever wanted could say whatever they wanted. But if you ask them, ‘Who told you this?’ they cannot reply.” Al-Shāfiʿī provided a similarly famous declaration, “The person who seeks knowledge without an isnād, not asking “Where is this from?,” indeed, he is like a person gathering wood at night. He carries on his back a bundle of wood when there may be a viper in it that could bite him.” Sunnis thus understood the isnād as the prime means of defending the true teachings of the Prophet ﷺ against heretics as well as protection from subtle deviations that might slip into Muslims’ beliefs and practice.
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The origins of the isnād were as commonsense as its function, beginning with the rise of hadith forgery. As the Successor Muhammad ibn Sīrīn (d. 110/729), a leading student of the Companion Anas ibn Mālik, explained: In the early period no one would ask about the isnād. But when the Strife [most probably the Second Civil War, 680–692 CE] began, they would say “Name for us your sources” so that the People of the Sunnah (ahl al-sunnah) could be identified and their hadiths accepted, and the People of Heresy (ahl al-bidʿah) could be identified and their hadiths ignored.
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In the milieu of the early Islamic period, simply demanding an isnād for reports attributed to the Prophet ﷺ was an excellent first line of defense against inauthentic material entering Muslim discourse. We can imagine the newly Muslim inhabitants of Kufa, still clinging to Christian or Zoroastrian lore, or even Bedouins eager to insinuate tribal Arab values into Islam, ascribing a saying to the Prophet as evidence for their ideas. If they provided no isnād at all, the reports would not enter the musnad collections of scholars like Abū Dāwūd al-Ṭayālisī (d. 204/820). The formative critic Shuʿba is quoted as saying, “All religious knowledge (ʿilm) which does not feature ‘he narrated to me’ or ‘he reported to me’ [the components of the isnād] is just vinegar and sprouts.”
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Step two: Rating transmitters and establishing contiguous transmission
On their own, however, isnāds could not deter a determined forger. As we saw with the hadiths on human reason, an isnād could be made up or inauthentic material could simply be equipped with an isnād and then circulated. Moreover, merely requiring someone to provide a source for a hadith they cited did not tell you if that source was reliable. The second tier of criticism thus involved identifying the individuals who constituted isnāds, evaluating their reliability, and then determining if there were any risks that someone unreliable might also have played some part in transmitting the report.
1) Transmitter evaluation
A hadith transmitter was evaluated according to two criteria. First, his or her character, correct belief, and level of piety were scrutinized in order to determine if he or she was ‘upright’ (ʿadl). Second, and much more importantly, the transmitter’s corpus of reports and narration practices were evaluated to decide if he or she was ‘accurate’ (ḍābit).
Hadith transmitter criticism (known as al-jarḥ wa-al-taʿdīl, ‘impugning and approving’) and isnād evaluation began in full with the first generation of renowned hadith critics, that of Shuʿbah ibn al-Ḥajjāj, Mālik ibn Anas, Sufyān al-Thawrī, al-Layth ibn Saʿd, and Sufyān ibn ʿUyaynah, who flourished in the mid to late eighth century in the cities of Basra, Kufa, Fustat (modern-day Cairo), Mecca, and Medina (see Figure 2). These scholars began the process of collecting people’s hadith narrations and examining both their bodies of material and their characters to determine if the material they purveyed could be trusted. Mālik is the first scholar known to have used technical terms such as ‘thiqah’ (reliable) to describe these narrators, while Shuʿba’s evaluations did not utilize any specialized vocabulary.
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The evaluations of this first great generation were studied and added to by their students, especially the two great Basran critics ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Mahdī (d. 198/814) and Yahyá ibn Saʿīd al-Qaṭṭān (d. 198/813). The later analyst Shams al-Dīn al-Dhahabī notes that “whoever they both criticize, by God, rarely do you find that criticism refuted [by others], and whoever they both agree on as trustworthy, he is accepted as proof.”
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The critical methods and opinions of Ibn Mahdī and al-Qaṭṭān passed on to their three most respected students, who can be seen as the beginning of the heyday of Sunni hadith criticism: Ibn Ḥanbal (d. 241/855) and his friend Yahyá ibn Maʿīn (d. 233/848) in Baghdad and ʿAlī ibn al-Madīnī in Basra (d. 234/849). Their students refined hadith criticism into its most exact and lasting form: the ‘Two Shaykhs’ al-Bukhārī and Muslim, the two senior critics of Rayy (modern Tehran), Abū Zurʿah al-Rāzī (d. 264/878) and his friend Abū Ḥātim al-Rāzī (d. 277/890), as well as influential younger critics of that generation such as al-Nasāʾī (d. 303/916).
The 900s saw several generations of critics who reviewed and reassessed the judgments of these earlier scholars and also continued to evaluate those involved in the ongoing transmission of hadiths: Ibn Abī Ḥātim al-Rāzī (d. 327/938), Ibn ʿAdī (d. 365/975-6), Ibn Ḥibbān al-Bustī (d. 354/965), Abū al-Ḥasan al-Dāraquṭnī (d. 385/995), and al-Hākim al-Naysābūrī (d. 405/1014).
Although the apex and most active period of hadith transmitter criticism is usually considered to be the eighth to tenth centuries, subsequent generations of critics contributed to this science as well. Hadiths were still transmitted with full isnāds into the early 1200s, so it was possible until that time for previously unrated hadiths to be in circulation among transmitters. Master hadith scholars like al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī (d. 463/1071) and Ibn ʿAsākir (d. 571/1176) therefore continued to rate transmitters living in their times. Furthermore, they synthesized, reconciled, and reexamined existing opinions on earlier transmitters.
This reconsideration of earlier transmitters’ standing has, in fact, never really ended. If we look at al-Dhahabī’s list of the expert critics whose opinions should be heeded, we find that it continues until al-Dhahabī ’s own time in the 1300s. One of the most commanding critics in the Sunni hadith tradition, ‘the Hadith Master (al-ḥāfiẓ)’ Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī, died in 852/1449. Hadith transmitter criticism has continued until the modern day. This is possible because, as we shall see, determining if someone was reliable or not had little to do with any personal experience with their character, its flaws, or fine qualities. Ultimately, it was the analysis of the body of their transmissions for corroboration that determined their accuracy (ḍabt) and thus their station.
How would a hadith critic such as Shuʿbah, al-Bukhārī, or Ibn ʿAdī actually evaluate a transmitter? First, it was essential to know who this transmitter was. If one was presented with a hadith transmitted from ‘someone,’ ‘Aḥmad,’ or ‘a group of people in Medina,’ how could one evaluate the strength of its isnād? By the mid 800s it had become accepted convention among hadith critics that a person needed two well-known transmitters to identify him sufficiently, prove that he existed, and narrate hadiths from him in order to qualify for rating. Otherwise, the transmitter would be dismissed as ‘unknown’ (majhūl) and the report automatically considered unreliable.
Second, the critic would collect all the reports that the transmitter had narrated from various teachers and then analyze them for corroboration, a process known as ‘consideration’ (iʿtibār). It was here that the musnad genre of hadith collection would be very useful, since they were organized not by subject matter but by narrators in the isnāds. But ultimately a critic would have to rely on a robust memory in order to recall all the different isnāds in which the transmitter in question played some part. For every hadith that the transmitter narrated from a certain teacher, the critic asks, “Did this teacher’s other students narrate this report too?” If the critic finds that, for all the teachers that the transmitter narrates from, his fellow students corroborated him for a very high percentage of his hadiths, then he is considered to be reliable in his transmissions. When asked what kind of transmitters should be abandoned as unreliable, Shuʿbah explained:
Someone who narrates excessively from well-known transmitters what these well-known transmitters do not recognize, his hadiths are cast aside. And if he makes a lot of mistakes, his hadiths are cast aside. And if he is accused of forgery (kādhib), his hadiths are cast aside. And if he narrates a hadith that is agreed upon as an error, and he does not hold himself accountable for that and reject the report, his hadiths are cast aside.
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