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Total Marks (100%):

10% - Attendance

60% - Final Exam

30% - Class participation:

a) Based on attendance – up to 14 marks

b) 3 sets of Quiz – 5 marks/set based on passing mark of 70%  (Total 15 marks)

c) 1 mark – Feedback form attempted

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Lesson 2: 40 Hadith with Golden Chain (Isnad)

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Lesson 2: 40 Hadith with Golden Chain (Isnad)

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أبو عمر الحنبلي

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أربعون حديثا بإسناد واحد عن مالك عن نافع عن ابن عمر للعلامة السيوطي

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أربعون حديثًا بإسناد واحدعن مالك عن نافع عن ابن عمر رضي الله عنهماتخريج العلامة جلال الدين السيوطي (ت 911 هـ) رحمه الله (تنشر لأول مرة عن نسخة نادرة ولله الحمد)[1] بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم الحمد لله إنابةً إليه وتضرعًا، والصلاة والسلام على محمد وآله وصحبه معًا، وبعدُ: فقد لهج المحدثون بتخريج الأربعين المتباينات، وقد خرجت تبعًا لهم أربعين كذلك، ثم بدا لي أن أخرج أربعين بإسناد واحد تكون كضد تلك الطريقة، وها هي هذه، والمسؤول من الله حسن المجاز إلى الحقيقة. الحديث الأول:...

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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 isnād s 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 youask 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.

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.

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."

Step two: Rating transmitters and establishing contiguous transmission

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' (ʿ adl). 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).

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 isnād s 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.

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.

Finally, the critic would examine the transmitter's character, religious beliefs, and piety in order to determine his 'uprightness' (ʿ adālah). Although later legal theorists would establish very formal requirements for someone to be declared 'upright,' such as the requirement widely accepted by Sunnis after the 1200s that the transmitter be "Muslim, of age, of sound mind, free of sinful behavior and defects in honor," early hadith critics were actually very flexible with determining uprightness.

This is most evident in the issue of transmitters who espoused beliefs that Sunnis considered heretical, such as Shiism, belonging to the Kharijite sect, or a belief in free will ( qadar). Although al-Shāfiʿī had declared that one could accept hadiths from transmitters regardless of their sectarian affiliations as long as they did not belong to certain Shiite sects that allowed lying, by the mid 900s scholars like Ibn Ḥibbān had declared a consensus among Sunni hadith critics that one could accept hadiths from any heretical transmitter provided he was not an extremist and did not actively try to convert others to his beliefs. In theory, this meant that one could accept hadiths from Shiite transmitters as long as they did not engage in virulently anti-Sunni practices such as cursing Abū Bakr or ʿUmar or transmit hadiths that seemed to preach the Shiite message.

In truth, however, early hadith critics did not follow these strictures. As the eighteenth-century Yemeni hadith analyst Ibn al-Amīr al-Ṣanʿānī (d. 1768) observed, later theorists had set up principles that did not apply to the realities of early hadith criticism. Al-Bukhārī, the most revered of all hadith critics, narrated two hadiths in his famous Ṣaḥīḥ through the extreme KharijiteʿImrān ibn Ḥiṭṭān. In his Sahīh, Muslim narrated the hadith that"Only a believer loves ʿAlī, and only a hypocrite hates him" through the known Shiite transmitter ʿAdī ibn Thābit. As we can see, the two uncontested masters of Sunni hadith criticism could narrate hadiths that they considered authentic through extremists and heretics who proselytized for their cause.

The explanation for this lies in the priorities of the early hadith critics. Simply put, if a transmitter consistently and accurately passed on hadiths he had heard from the previous generation, hadith critics had little interest in his beliefs or practice. Ibn Maʿīn described the Shiite transmitter ʿAbd al- Raḥmān ibn Ṣāliḥ as "trustworthy, sincere, and Shiite, but who would rather fall from the sky than misrepresent half a word." One prominent early hadith transmitter, Ismāʿīl ibn ʿUlayyah (d. 193/809), became so shamefully intoxicated on one occasion that he had to be carried home on a donkey. Yet he was a reliable transmitter, so his hadiths were accepted. Although later theorists of the hadith tradition would talk of the two pillars of reliability as 'uprightness ( ʿadālah) and accuracy ( ḍabt),' al-Sanʿānī rightly pointed out that one should reorder them 'accuracy and uprightness,' since the former greatly outweighed the latter.

Although in the eighth and ninth centuries each hadith critic used slightly different and sometimes shifting terms to describe a transmitter's level of reliability, by the early tenth century a conventional jargon had emerged. Ibn Abī Ḥātim al-Rāzī (d. 327/938) lists the levels as:

1. 'Reliable' (thiqah, mutqin, thabt) transmitter's hadiths can be used as proof in legal scholarship with no hesitation

2. 'Sincere' (sadūq, lā baʾs bihi) transmitter's hadiths are recorded and can be taken as proof if bolstered or corroborated

3. 'Venerable' (shaykh) transmitter's hadiths are used for identifying corroboration depending on strength

4. 'Righteous' (ṣāliḥ) transmitter's hadiths are used for identifying corroboration depending on strength

5. 'Lenient on hadith' (layyin al-ḥadīth) transmitter's hadiths can be used for identifying corroboration

6. 'Not strong' (laysa bi-qawī) transmitter's hadiths can still be used for identifying corroboration

7. 'Weak' (daʿīf) transmitter's hadiths can be used to corroborate but not on their own

8. 'Liar, abandoned' (matrūk al-ḥadīth, dhāhib al-ḥadīth, kadhdhāb) transmitter's hadiths are not used at all.

Books of transmitter criticism

Hadith transmitter criticism often took place in discussion sessions among critics or with their students, but its results were set down by master critics in dictionaries of transmitter evaluation ( kutub al-rijāl). Early works include the Ṭabaqāt al-kubrá (The Great Book of Generations) of Ibn Saʿd (d. 230/845), the Aḥwāl al-rijāl (Conditions of the Transmitters) of al-Jūzajānī (d. 259/873), the massive 'Great History ( al-Tārīkh al-kabīr)' of al-Bukhārī, and the Jarḥ wa-al-taʿdīl of Ibn Abī Ḥātim al-Rāzī. Some books focused specifically on discussing transmitters whom the author felt were reliable; these included al-ʿIjlī's (d. 261/875) Tārīkh al-thiqāt and Ibn Ḥibbān's Kitāb al-thiqāt. Voluminous books were devoted to listing and discussing weak transmitters as well. The most important are the Kitāb al-duʿafāʾ al-kabīr of al-Bukhārī (now lost), the Kāmil fī duʿafāʾ al-rijāl of Ibn ʿAdī and Ibn Hibbān's Kitāb al-majrūḥīn. Such works presented critics' opinions of a transmitter along with a selection of the unacceptable narrations that they transmitted. Because they consistently evaluated the reliability of personalities they mention, local histories like al-Khaṭīb's History of Baghdad are also works of transmitter criticism.

In the period of consolidation and analysis from the 1300s to the 1600s, later critics amalgamated and digested these earlier works of hadith criticism. ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Maqdisī (d. 600/1203) wrote his al-Kamāl fī maʿrifat asmāʾ al-rijāl (The Perfection in Knowing the Names of Transmitters), presenting earlier descriptions and evaluations of all the transmitters in the Six Books. Jamāl al-Dīn al-Mizzī (d. 742/1341) added to this work and further analyzed the ratings of the transmitters within the Six Books in his Tahdhīb al-kamāl (The Refinement of Perfection), published today in thirty-five volumes. Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī produced an abridgment of this work with his own comments entitled Tahdhīb al-tahdhīb (The Refinement of the Refinement). Scholars like the Egyptian Ibn al-Mulaqqin (d. 804/1401) added the transmitters found in other hadith collections such as the Musnads of Ibn Ḥanbal and al-Shāfiʿī as well as the Ṣaḥīḥ of Ibn Khuzaymah and the Mustadrak of al-Ḥākim to expanded versions of al-Mizzī's book. The Ḥanafī scholar of Cairo, Badr al-Dīn al-ʿAynī (d. 855/1451), devoted a rijāl work to the transmitters in al-Ṭaḥāwī's collections.

Reconciling disagreements among critics

With the plethora of transmitter critics from the eighth century on, how was a later critic or analyst supposed to know whose opinion to take on the reliability of a narrator or a hadith? Ibn Isḥāq (d. 150/767), for example, the author of the famous biography of the Prophet ﷺ, was a very controversial figure. Mālik, Ibn al-Qaṭṭān, Ibn Ḥanbal, and others considered him highly unreliable because he accepted hadiths from questionable narrators as well as Christians and Jews. But Shuʿbah felt he was impeccably reliable, ʿAlī ibn al-Madīnī named him one of the pivots of hadith transmission in his age, and all the Six Books relied on him as a narrator (though the Ṣaḥīḥayn of al-Bukhārī and Muslim only use him for rare backup narrations). Certainly, this created a great potential for disagreement over the reliability of transmitters and, hence, of hadiths themselves.

The standing of the Companions

The Companions of the Prophet ﷺ achieved a unique place in the worldview of Sunni hadith critics. Although some early historians and transmitters like al-Wāqidī (d. 207/822-3) only considered those who reached adulthood during the lifetime of the Prophet to be Companions, the definition that became accepted by Sunnis was much less strict. As al-Bukhārī notes in his Ṣaḥīḥ, a Companion is anyone who saw the Prophet, even for a moment, while a believer and who then died as a Muslim.

This had tremendous consequences for hadith transmission, for by 900 CE Sunnis considered that all the Companions of the Prophet were automatically 'upright (ʿ adl).' This belief was based on Qur'anic verses such as "You are the best community brought out for humanity" ( kuntum khayr ummah ukhrijat lil-nās) (Qur'an 3:110) and Prophetic hadiths such as "The best of generations is the one in which I was sent, then that which follows, then that which follows."In effect,then, the first generation of hadith transmitters was beyond criticism. In fact, the famous ninth-century hadith critic Abū Zurʿah al-Rāzī stated that anyone who criticized a Companion was a heretic.

Later analysts would refine this understanding of the Companions' uprightness. As Ibn Taymiyyah (d. 728/1328) explained, the Companions were not perfect-Mughīrah ibn Shuʿbah had lied, and Walīd ibn ʿUqbah was a known drunkard. But none had ever lied about the Prophet ﷺ. Many Sunni scholars have thus understood uprightness as meaning that the Companions' exposure to the tremendous spiritual charisma of the Prophet prevented them from lying about him but did not prevent other sins.

The Sunni critics' view of the Companions was both ideologically driven and practical. Islam was built on the idea that the Companions of the Prophet ﷺ had inherited his authority and passed on his teachings reliably. In that sense, as a group they were above reproach. In terms of hadith criticism, however, the critics' reach did not extend far enough back to apply the rules of transmitter criticism to the Companions. The earliest critic, al-Zuhrī, had met only the youngest of the Companions, and his hadith criticism mostly addressed the reports he heard from other Successors. Al-Zuhrī, Mālik, and Shuʿbah had direct experience with the Successors, but they had no real way to evaluate the uprightness or accuracy of Companions. In a sense, reports such as Aisha's aforementioned rejection of hadiths for content reasons represent vestiges of hadith criticism from the Companion generation.

The chicken and the egg: Who made the early experts experts?

The names of the early generations of master hadith critics (Figure 2) overlap to a large extent with those of major hadith transmitters. So did just transmitting a vast number of hadiths make a person a reliable hadith transmitter or an expert critic? The answer seems to be no-just because one was a major transmitter did not mean that one was reliable. Ibn Isḥāq was an essential pivot of hadith transmission in Medina, but it became clear to many critics even in his own lifetime that he was not at all discriminating in what he transmitted. Mālik, on the other hand, only transmitted from two people (ʿAbd al-Karīm ibn Abī al-Mukhāriq and ʿAtāʾ al-Khurāsānī) that he (and later critics) did not feel were reliable ( thiqah). Later critics also distinguished between an early critic/transmitter's own transmissions and his evaluations of others. Al-Zuhrī's opinions carried great influence, but later critics all agreed that his mursal hadiths (see below for a discussion of this term) were too unreliable to use. The great critic Sufyān al-Thawrī regularly narrated hadiths that others considered unreliable, whereas when Shuʿbah transmitted a hadith, it was understood that he believed it was authentic.

2) Contiguity of transmission( al-ittiṣāl)

Evaluating the sources of a hadith was of little use, however, if a critic could not be sure who these sources were. If one transmitter had never actually met the person from whom they quoted the hadith, or if it was known that he had not heard that hadith from his teacher, then who was the intermediary? With no way to guarantee that intermediary's reliability, there were endless possibilities for what sort of deviation or forgery could have occurred. Establishing that a hadith had been transmitted by a contiguous, unbroken isnād from the Prophet ﷺ was thus as crucial as transmitter reliability for determining the authenticity of a hadith. If it could not be established that the people in the isnād had heard from one another, then hadith critics considered the chain of transmission broken ( munqaṭi ʿ) and thus unreliable.

Because establishing contiguous transmission was so important, by the mid 700s transmitters had become very serious about specifying exactly how hadith transmission occurred. The most accurate forms of direct transmission were either reading a teacher's hadiths back to him (often indicated by the phrase "he reported to us" ( akhbaranā')) or listening to the teacher read his hadiths (often indicated by "he narrated to us" ( ḥaddathanā')). If a teacher gave a student his books of hadiths to copy, this was termed "handing over" ( munāwalah). Although there was debate over whether reading hadiths to a teacher or hearing them read was more accurate, all scholars acknowledged that 'handing over' and liberal 'permission to transmit' were the most tenuous forms of transmission. Reading a book with no transmission from the teacher at all ("finding" ( wijādah)) inspired no confidence at all.

Obfuscation in transmission(tadlīs)

Critics of the eighth, ninth, and early tenth centuries often attempted to be more exact than just establishing if two transmitters had met. They sought to determine exactly which hadiths certain transmitters had heard from their teachers. Shuʿba thus studied the hadiths of his teacher Qatādah until he found that he had only heard three from his teacher Abū al-ʿĀliyah. This was especially important in the case of tadlīs, or obfuscation in transmission. Tadlīsoccurred when a transmitter cited an isnād in an ambiguous manner, such as saying "so-and-so said," implying that he had heard the hadith directly from the person when in fact he was omitting his immediate source for the hadith. Transmitters might hide their immediate source because he or she was considered unreliable or espoused beliefs unacceptable in Sunni Islam. Tadlīs did not always occur for insidious reasons. If a student had to leave a dictation session to answer nature's call, for example, he would hear the hadiths that he had missed from a classmate. When narrating those hadiths, however, he might leave out the classmate's name and simply say "Teacher so-and-so said." Because tadlīs was often innocuous, very few transmitters were totally innocent of it. Only Shuʿbah ibn al-Ḥajjāj was known to never lapse into it.

Identifying tadlīs was a primary concern of critics in the eighth century and beyond. By interrogating a transmitter a critic could determine whom he omitted from isnāds in instances of tadlīs. Transmitters like Sufyān ibn ʿUyaynah, who only omitted the names of reliable figures, could be trusted even when doing tadlīs. Others who often omitted the names of weak narrators, like Ibn Isḥāq, could not be relied upon unless they specified direct transmission. Al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī and Ibn Ḥajar both wrote books discussing tadlīs and those accused of it.

When such mursal hadiths were recorded in muṣannaf works like the Muwaṭṭaʾ or the legal responses of Abū Ḥanīfah, however, they presented a problem for later hadith critics. How should they be treated? Because mursal hadiths had incomplete isnāds and one could not be sure from whom a Successor was narrating, mursals were almost always considered unreliable by hadith critics. After extensive research on the mursal reports of certain early transmitters, however, and attempts to find counterparts to them with full isnāds, critics approved of certain transmitters' mursal hadiths. Al-Shāfiʿī concluded that the mursals of the Successor Saʿīd ibn al-Musayyab (d. 94/713) were reliable because the source he omitted, his father-in-law Abū Hurayrah, was the most knowledgeable Companion about hadiths. Critics debated the reliability of al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī's mursal hadiths-his contemporary Ibn Sīrīn said that al-Ḥasan was totally uncritical about his hadith sources, so his mursalswere useless. Yaḥyá al-Qaṭṭān said that he had studied all of al-Ḥasan's mursals and found versions with full isnādsfor all but two of them. Ibn Abī Ḥātim al-Rāzī composed a whole book entitled Kitāb al-marāsīl (The Book of Mursals) in an attempt to determine which Successors had heard hadiths from which Companions.

Step three: Finding corroboration for the hadith

Corroboration had played a central role in determining the reliability of a transmitter-if he narrated hadiths that other students of his source did not, then his reliability was questioned. But a forger could still simply take an isnād of a respected transmitter and attach it to a freshly concocted hadith. The third and final step in hadith criticism thus involved looking for corroboration for the hadith itself.

Corroboration took two general forms (see Figure 3). Since a 'hadith' was generally associated with the Companion who narrated it, another version of the same Prophetic tradition transmitted by a second Companion or an instance of the Prophet ﷺ saying something similar on another occasion were both considered corroboration for a hadith. Such a report was termed a "witness" ( shāhid). When one transmitter corroborated the report related by another transmitter that they had both heard from a common source, this was termed a "parallelism" ( mutābaʿah). Hadith scholars described these two forms of corroboration with the aphorism "parallelism bolsters the narration; a witness bolsters the tradition." A witness report need not be exactly the same tradition as the hadith it supports. Even a report with a different wording but the same meaning corroborated the fact that the Prophet ﷺ had expressed a certain idea or sentiment. Parallelisms solidified the reliability of a particular narration of a hadith.

A famous tenth-century hadith critic, Ibn Hibbān, describes the process of searching for corroboration (called iʿtibār, 'consideration') thus:

Let us say we come across [the transmitter] Ḥammād ibn Salamah, and we see that he has narrated a report from Ayyūb [al-Sakhtiyānī], from Ibn Sīrīn, from Abū Hurayrah, from the Prophet ﷺ, but we do not find that report from anyone else from the students of Ayyūb. What is required of us now is to refrain momentarily from criticizing Ḥammād, and to consider what his contemporaries narrated. So we must start by looking at this report: Did Ḥammād's students in general narrate it from him, or just one of them? If it is the case that his students narrated it from him, then it has been established that Ḥammād really did narrate that report, even if that comes through a weak narrator from him, because that narration is added to the first narration from Ḥammād. So if it has been established correctly that Ḥammād narrated a report from Ayyūb that is not corroborated by others, again we must pause. For it does not follow automatically that there is some weakness here, but rather we must ask: Did any of the reliable transmitters ( thiqāt) narrate this report from Ibn Sīrīn other than Ayyūb? If we find one, then it has been established that the report has some basis ( aṣl yarjiʿu ilayhi). If not, then we must ask: Did anyone from among the reliable transmitters narrate this report from Abū Hurayrah other than Ibn Sīrīn? If such a narration is found, then it has been established that the report has a basis ( aṣl). If not, we ask: Did anyone narrate this report from the Prophet ﷺ other than Abū Hurayrah? If so, then it has been established correctly that the report has some basis. But when that is not the case, and the report contradicts the compilations of these three [people at three levels in the isnād], then it is established without a doubt that the report is forged, and that the lone person who narrated it forged it.

As Ibn Ḥibbān describes, if a report is not corroborated at any one level of the isnād, then the reliability of that transmitter's narration from his source is dubious. If the report is uncorroborated at all levels of the isnād, then it is almost certainly totally baseless. If a report was not corroborated either at some level of the isnād or from the Prophet ﷺ in general, early hadith critics deemed it "unknown/unacceptable" ( munkar).

Here we see that Muslim critics worked backwards in time when authenticating hadiths. What probably first occurs to readers today is that an isnād 'starts' with the Prophet and 'ends' when the hadith is recorded in a book. But this assumes that the hadith actually existed in the time of the Prophet and that we are merely tracing how it came to us. For a Muslim hadith critic, a hadith was at first just an unverified claim; its isnād began with the person who told him the hadith. It only extended backward in time when the critic verified each link in the isnād, step by step, until it "reached" ( waṣl) the Prophet ﷺ.

Of course, this process of demanding corroboration took context into consideration. As Muslim ibn al-Ḥajjāj informs us, "If it has been established that your hadith corpus agrees with those of the other reliable narrators, then narrating some uncorroborated material is acceptable." If a transmitter studied with a certain teacher for ten years, then it is not surprising that he might narrate a selection of hadiths from his teacher that students who only studied with him for six months did not recount. The great critic Abū Ḥātim al-Rāzī was asked to criticize ʿAbd Allāh ibn Ṣāliḥ, the secretary of Layth ibn Saʿd, for having narrated uncorroborated hadiths from Layth. Abū Ḥātim replied sarcastically, "You ask me this about the closest person to Layth, who was with him on voyages and at home and spent much time alone with him?" But, Muslim continues, if some lesser known transmitter narrated a hadith from a prolific hadith scholar like al-Zuhrī whose numerous and respected students did not recognize that hadith, then that report would be automatically declared "unacceptable" ( munkar).

Like our modern investigative reporter's source, however, a transmitter could earn such a level of confidence in the eyes of critics that he could narrate uncorroborated reports without arousing concern. Critics like al-Bukhārī and Ibn ʿAdī had examined the hadiths of master transmitters like al-Zuhrī, Mālik, Ibn al-Mubārak or Qutaybah b. Saʿīd and found that they were corroborated to such a great extent that they could be relied upon for a number of uncorroborated hadiths as well. These figures were so central to hadith transmission in general that if anyone were to have heard a rare hadith, it would be them. An uncorroborated hadith narrated by an isnād of such pillars was known as "an authentic rare" ( ṣaḥīḥ gharīb) hadith. The hadith of Mālik al-Zuhrī Anas that the Prophet entered Mecca upon its conquest with a mail helmet on his head and ordered the killing of Ibn Khaṭal, an infamous enemy of Islam, was known only bythis isnād. Because this hadith was narrated by transmitters whose collections of hadiths were vaster than almost any other people of their time, this hadith was considered authentic even though it was uncorroborated.

Conversely, less stellar figures inspired no such confidence. As al-Tirmidhī explained, "Anyone from whom a hadith is narrated who is accused [of poor performance in hadith] or is criticized as weak in hadiths for his lack of carefulness and numerous mistakes, if that hadith is only known through that narration, it cannot be used as proof." So the hadith narrated by the lone isnād of Nāṣiḥ al-ʿAjamī, from Simāk ibn Ḥarb, from Jābir ibn Samurah, from the Prophet ﷺ: "For a man to teach his child proper manners is better than to give a whole bushel in charity"( laʾan yuʾaddiba al-rajul waladahu khayr min an yataṣaddaqa bi-ṣāʿ) was considered unacceptable ( munkar) becauseneither Nāṣiḥ nor Simāk were consistently reliable transmitters.

Even when an isnād looked perfect, early hadith critics did not completely ignore the need for comparing it with other narrations of the report. As the eleventh-century critic al-Khalīlī (d. 446/1054) warned, "Even if a hadith is provided to you with an isnād from al-Zuhrī or another one of the masters, do not declare it authentic merely because of that isnād, for even a reliable transmitter ( thiqah) can err." By comparing different versions of the same hadith, critics could uncover flaws, known as ʿ ilal, which might have evaded the best transmitter. Such flaws included one narration of a hadith adding additional words into the text of the report that were not found in more reliable versions. A very common flaw was that one narrator would confuse a Companion's or Successor's statement with a Prophetic hadith. The great ʿ ilal critic of Baghdad, al-Dāraquṭnī, found such an error in Muslim's famous Ṣaḥīḥ. By examining all the narrations of a report describing how God will grant the believers a vision of Himself on the Day of Judgment, al-Dāraquṭnī concluded that these were actually the words of the Successor ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Ibn Abī Laylá (d. 82/701-2) and not of the Prophet ﷺ himself.

This advanced level of seeking out corroboration and comparing narrations was set down in books of ʿ ilal, a genre that flourished in the ninth and tenth centuries. The ʿ ilal works of ʿAlī ibn al-Madīnī, Ibn Ḥanbal, and Ibn Abī Ḥātim al-Rāzī were very famous, but the massive ʿ ilal book of al-Dāraqutnī, published in eleven volumes, dwarfs them all. After the 1000s, ʿ ilal books became rare, and only unusually competent later critics like the Moroccan Ibn al-Qaṭṭān al-Fāsī (d. 628/1231) or Ibn al-Jawzī (d. 597/1201) produced them. ʿ Ilal criticism was only possible for critics in the early period when hadiths were still narrated by full isnāds and critics had access to reams of notes from dictation sessions holding versions of reports that may not have survived into later times. As al-Suyūṭī admitted, by the 1400s hadith critics did not have the vast array of muṣannaf s, hadith notebooks, and dictation sessions available to ascholar like al-Dāraquṭnī. Such later scholars could only judge hadiths based on material they received from earlier critics.

When we think of how one should evaluate the reliability of things we hear, we focus on their content as much as their source. Even the most trustworthy source would arouse suspicion if he announced that aliens had landed in his backyard. Yet when we thumb through books of transmitter criticism or ʿ ilal, one of the most obvious characteristics of early hadith criticism is that early scholars almost never discussed the contents of hadith, let alone explicitly rejected a hadith because its meaning was unacceptable. Why is this?

Certainly, the esteem in which Muslims held Muhammad ﷺ and their belief that God spoke to him of the distant past and events to come affected their approach to criticizing hadiths. Unlike a modern person skeptically dismissing the sayings of a television psychic, a Muslim critic would not declare a report attributed to the Prophet ﷺ to be a forgery simply because it described something that average people could not know.

Nonetheless, we know that early critics like al-Bukhārī and Muslim were willing and able to reject a hadith because they found its contents inherently flawed. In his entry on the transmitter ʿAwn ibn ʿUmārah al-Qaysī in his 'Great Book of Weak Transmitters,' al-Bukhārī noted that one of the unacceptable hadiths he narrated was "The signs of the Day of Judgment are after the year 200/815."Al-Bukhārī rejects the hadith because "these two hundred years have passed, and none of these signs have appeared." In another work on transmitters, al-Bukhārī criticizes Muhammad ibn Fadāʾ because he narrated the hadith "The Prophet forbade breaking apart Muslim coins in circulation."Al-Bukhārīnotes that Muslims did not mintcoins until early Umayyad times; "they did not exist at the time of the Prophet." Muslim bin al-Ḥajjāj rejects a hadith saying that there are five chapters of the Qur'an that are the equivalent of one-fourth of the holy book-a total of five-fourths. He calls this logical contradiction "reprehensible, and it is not conceivable that its meaning is correct." But why were such instances of content criticism so rare?

To answer this question, we have to remember that Sunni hadith criticism emerged in the context of intense ideological struggle between the ahl al-ḥadīth and the school of early Muslim rationalists, known as the Muʿtazila. For the Muʿtazila, the only sources on which one could rely to interpret properly Islamic law and dogma were the Qur'an, reports from the Prophet ﷺ that were so well-known they could not possibly be forged, and human reason (ʿ aql). In order to know if any hadith was authentically from the Prophet, Muʿtazilite scholars like Abū al-Qāsim al-Balkhī (d. 319/931) believed that it had to agree with the Qur'an and reason.

The ahl al-ḥadīth's understanding of man's relationship to religion was the converse. Only by submitting oneself completely to the uncorrupted ways of the Prophet ﷺ and early Muslim community as transmitted through the isnād could one truly obey God and His Messenger. Unlike the Muʿtazilah, whom they saw as arrogantly glorifying human reason, or the ahl al-raʾy, whom they viewed as rejecting or accepting hadiths arbitrarily when it suited their legal opinion, the ahl al-ḥadīth perceived themselves as "cultivating the ways of the Messenger, fending off heretical innovation and lies from revealed knowledge." It was not man's right to question the revealed religion that the Prophet ﷺ brought and that was preserved through the isnād. As al-Zuhrī expressed, "From God comes the message; upon the Messenger of God is its delivery; and upon us is submission." We thus find the Companion ʿImrān ibn Ḥusayn (d. 52/672) instructing new Muslims that the Prophet ﷺ had said, "Whoever is grieved for excessively [by his family] will be punished [for that]" ( man yunāhu ʿalayhi yuʿadhdhab).When a person questioned the reasonableness of this notion, ʿImrān replied, "The Messenger of God has spoken the truth, and you have disbelieved!" A defender of the ahl al-ḥadīth against the Muʿtazilah, Ibn Qutaybah (d. 276/889) states:

We do not resort except to that to which the Messenger of God resorted. And we do not reject what has been transmitted authentically from him because it does not accord with our conjectures orseem correct to reason... we hope that in this lies the path to salvation and escape from the baseless whims of heresy.

But we know from the examples above that early Sunni hadith critics did note problems in the meanings of certain hadiths. Human reason cannot simply be switched off. Nor should it be, since Abraham had rejected idolatry and embraced the worship of the Creator of the Heavens and the Earth by using reason to observe nature and ponder what God must be (Qur'an 6:76-9).

In the context of their debate with the Mu'tazila, however, it is clear why the ahl al-ḥadīth could not criticize the meaning of hadiths openly. The whole purpose of the isnād was to guarantee that the Prophet ﷺ said something without relying on man's flawed reason. If hadith critics admitted that a hadith could have an authentic isnād but still be a forgery because its meaning was unacceptable, then they would be admitting that their rationalist opponents were correct. Hadith critics dealt with this by assuming that a problem in the meaning of a hadith was really a symptom of a flaw in the isnād. If you could not have a strong isnād with a forged report, then any problem in the meaning of a hadith must mean that there was a problem in the isnād. When ahl al-ḥadīth critics like al-Bukhārīcame across a hadith whosemeaning they found unacceptable, they examined the isnād to find how the error occurred and listed the hadith in the biography of that transmitter as evidence of his weakness. Ibn ʿAdī often states that the questionable hadiths that a certain transmitter narrates "demonstrate that he is unreliable."

Because early hadith criticism was so openly focused on the isnād as the primary means of authentication, it was very often difficult to tell when a critic was rejecting a whole Prophetic tradition or just one narration of that hadith. The term "unacceptable" ( munkar) for a hadith could mean that this version of the hadith narrated through a certain isnād was unreliable but other authentic versions existed, or that the tradition was entirely forged. Another phrase used to reject a hadith, "it has no basis" ( laysa lahu aṣl), could mean that the hadith had no basis from that transmitter (but was well established from others) or that that particular tradition was baseless in general. But even concluding that the terms munkar or lā aṣl lahu denoted 'forged' does not necessarily mean that the critic found the meaning of the hadith in question unacceptable. As Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr (d. 463/1070) explained, "How many hadiths are there with a weak isnād but a correct meaning?" Al-Tirmidhī notes that Yaḥyá al-Qaṭṭān had declared the following hadith narrated by Anas to be munkar: "A man said, 'O Messenger of God, should I tie up [the camel] and trust in God or leave it free and trust in God?'' The Prophet ﷺ said, 'Tie it up and trust in God.'"Al-Tirmidhīadds that this report was totally baseless fromAnas, "but its likes have been narrated from another Companion ʿAmr ibn Umayyah al-Ḍamrī, from the Prophet."

Starting in the late 1000s, however, as the Muʿtazilite rationalist threat faded from view and Sunni Islam emerged triumphant, hadith critics began writing books that rejected whole Prophetic traditions, often because their meanings were unacceptable. These books were known as works of mawdūʿāt, which listed ' mawdūʿ,' or 'forged' hadiths. The earliest known mawdūʿ āt book, unfortunately lost to us, was that of Abū Saʿīd al-Naqqāsh al-Iṣbahānī (d. 414/1023). The earliest surviving one is the Tadhkirat al-mawḍūʿāt of Muhammad ibn Ṭāhir al-Maqdisī (d. 507/1113). Perhaps the most famous mawḍūʿāt work is the huge Kitāb al-mawḍūʿāt of Ibn al-Jawzī (d. 597/1201). Mawḍūʿāt books flourished in later Islamic times, with well-knownworks including the Aḥādīth al-daʿīfah of Ibn Taymiyyah (d. 728/1328), the al-Laʾālī al-masnūʿah of al-Suyūtī, the Asrār al-marfūʿah of Mullā ʿAlī Qārī (d. 1014/1606), the Fawāʾid al-majmūʿah of the Yemeni Muhammad al-Shawkānī (d. 1834), and the Kitāb al-āthār al-marfūʿa of the Indian ʿAbd al-Ḥayy al-Laknawī (d. 1886-7). Some of these scholars wrote books on forged hadiths designed to be useful references for non-experts. ʿUmar ibn Badr al-Mawṣilī (d. 622/1225), for example, wrote the book Sufficing One from Memorization and Books on Issues on which there are No Reliable Hadīths ( al-Mughnī ʿan al-hifẓ wa-al-kitāb fīmā lam yaṣiḥḥa shayʾ fī al-bāb).

Early mawḍūʿāt books listed hadiths along with the isnād flaws that showed they were forged, relying on the criticisms of specific narrations made by the likes of al-Bukhārī and Ibn ʿAdī. This was highly problematic, since these books implied that any hadith with that wording was forged, while there might be other, sound narrations. In the mid twelfth century the genre began shifting to openly rejecting hadiths because of their meaning. The mawdūʿāt book of al-Jawzaqānī (d. 543/1148-9), for example, states "Every hadith that contradicts the Sunnah is cast away and the person who says it is rejected as a transmitter." This process reached a plateau with the al-Manār al-munīf fī al-ṣaḥīḥ wa-al-daʿīf (The Lofty Lighthouse forAuthentic and Weak Hadiths), the mawḍūʿāt book of Ibn Qayyim al-Jawzīyah (d. 751/1350), who devoted a large section of the work to listing all the features of a hadith's contents that demonstrated it was forged.

Of course, freely engaging in content criticism was opening a Pandora's box. A critic might fall into exactly that trap that the early ahl al-ḥadīth claimed they were avoiding: making man's flawed reason the arbiter of religious truth. Although later critics would maintain, as Ibn al-Jawzī states, that "any hadith that you see contradicting reason or fundamental principles [of Islam], know that it is forged," they would also insist that one should not be too hasty in such judgments. After all, the critic might not have grasped the proper way of reconciling such contradictions. A few Sunni hadith critics in the later period, such as al-Dhahabī (d. 748/1348) and ʿAbd Allāh al-Ghumārī (d. 1993), seemed at ease openly rejecting hadiths based on their contents, sometimes even when their isnād s seemed sound. But the mainstream Sunni tradition is much better exemplified by scholars like al-Suyūṭī and Mullā ʿAlī al-Qārī. The former warned that a hadith could be rejected due to its contents only after all efforts to reconcile its meaning with the Qur'an and established Sunnah had failed. And "the door of possible interpretation is definitely wide," added al-Qārī. Prominent scholars declared a hadith in which the Prophet ﷺ dreamt he saw God as a beardless youth to be a blatant forgery due to its anthropomorphism. Al-Qārī replied that dreams are merely symbolic, not reality. Thus, he argued, the hadith's meaning was sound. This tension between submitting one's reason to a transmitted text and using one's reason to evaluate the text's authenticity has furnished fertile ground for debate among Muslim scholars until today.

From the time of Mālik (d. 179/795) to the late ninth century, hadith critics conceived of hadiths as falling between two poles in terms of the strength of their isnāds: ṣaḥīḥ ('sound,' 'authentic') and daʿīf/ saqīm ('weak' or 'unsound,' literally 'sick'). In terms of their levelof corroboration, critics described hadiths as being 'well-known' ( mashhūr) or 'unacceptable, unknown' ( munkar). A hadith that was declared ṣaḥīḥ or mashhūr represented the authenticated words of the Prophet ﷺ, while weak or munkar hadiths were those not fully established as emanating from him.

It is difficult to know exactly how early hadith critics defined ṣaḥīḥ hadiths, since they were very laconic in their works. Ibn Khuzaymah defined the hadiths that he selected for his ṣaḥīḥ collection as those "that an upright ( ʿadl) transmitter narrates from another upstanding transmitter continuously to [the Prophet] without any break in the isnād or any impugning of the transmitters."Later analysts such asIbn al-Ṣalāḥ (d. 643/1245) and Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī (d. 852/1449) examined the methodologies of the early masters and defined a ṣaḥīḥ hadith as one narrated by an unbroken isnād of reliable ( thiqah) transmitters, namely those who combined upstandingness and accuracy, all the way back to Prophet ﷺ without any concealed flaws (ʿ ilal) or contradicting a more reliable source.

Beginning with the work of al-Bukhārī's student Abū ʿĪsá al-Tirmidhī (d. 279/892), hadith scholars developed a new name to describe the hadiths that were not ṣaḥīḥ but still strong enough to use as proof in Islamic law: ḥasan, or 'fair.' Al-Tirmidhī describes a ḥasan hadith as one that "does not have in its isnād someone who is accused of lying or forgery, is not anomalous ( shādhdh), and is narrated via more than one chain of transmission." For al-Tirmidhī, a ḥasan hadith was thus a report whose isnād was not seriously flawed and enjoyed corroboration through other narrations, which mitigated the chances of a serious error creeping into the text of the report. The later jurist and hadith scholar al-Khaṭṭābī (d. 388/998) described ḥasan hadiths as those "with an established basis and whose transmitters were well-known."

If we are told hadiths from the Messenger of God concerning what is permissible and forbidden, the sunan and laws, then we are strict with their isnāds. But if we are told hadiths from the Prophet about the virtues of certain acts ( faḍāʾil al-aʿmāl), or what does not create a rule or remove one, then we are lax with the isnād s.

In addition to moralizing or exhortatory preaching, the standards for hadith authenticity also dropped for genres outside what was considered the purview of musnad hadiths, or hadiths with full isnāds originating with the Prophet ﷺ and generally addressing legal issues. These included stories about the Prophet's campaigns and the subsequent Islamic conquests ( maghāzī), reports from Companions and Successors about the meanings of Qur'anic words or the contexts in which Qur'anic verses were revealed ( tafsīr), and stories foretelling the end of days ( malāḥim). As Ibn Ḥanbal stated, these three genres "had no basis" ( aṣl)-namely, they often consisted of statements made by Companions or Successors. In other words, they were often not Prophetic hadiths at all.

Here we can note a remarkable feature of the way in which Sunni Muslims understood the boundaries of religion and prioritized the functions of scripture. Today we consider the stories that religious traditions tell about the apocalypse and the means by which they propagate a moral vision of the world to be essential dimensions of a faith. For Muslims in the classical period, however, they were merely tools by which scholars could purvey the true substance of Islam, which the hadith tradition was designed to preserve: law, ritual, and essential beliefs about God.

The earliest known takhrīj book was the work that ʿAbd al-ʿAẓīm al-Mundhirī (d. 656/1258) devoted to the Muhadhdhab, a major work of Shāfi'ī law written by Abū Isḥāq al-Shīrāzī (d. 476/1083). Many takhrīj books devoted to works of Islamic law followed. The Ḥanafīal-Zaylaʿī produced his famous Naṣb al-rāyah (Erecting the Standard), a takhrīj of the hadiths in the Hidāyah, a formative Hanafī law book by al-Marghīnānī (d. 593/1196-7). Ibn al-Mulaqqin (d. 804/1401) and Ibn Ḥajar wrote their Badr al-munīr and Talkhīs al-ḥabīr respectively, both devoted to the hadiths included in the major Shāfiʿī legal text of al-Rāfiʿī. Several takhrīj books dealt with the hadiths cited in prominent books of legal theory, such as Ibn Kathīr's Tuḥfat al-ṭālib, which addressed the contents of Ibn al-Ḥājib's abridged treatise on legal theory. Ibn Ḥajar also devoted a takhrīj work to the Kashshāf, the famous Qur'anic commentary by al-Zamakhsharī (d. 538/1144). Renowned Sufi texts also attracted takhrījs. Ibn Ḥajar's teacher Zayn al-Dīn al-ʿIrāqī (d. 806/1404) wrote a very critical takhrīj of the hadiths that al-Ghazālī had used as proof in his famous but controversial opus, the Ihyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn (Revival of the Religious Sciences). Ibn Hajar's student, Shams al-Dīn al-Sakhāwī (d. 902/1497), wrote a takhrīj of al-Sulamī's popular Forty Hadith collection on Sufism.

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Authenticating Hadith and the History of Hadith Criticism | Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research

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How do we know that Hadith is credible? This paper discusses the origins, mechanics, and development of Sunni hadith criticism, from the perspective of Muslim scholarship.

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Klasifikasi Hadis (Arab) - Imam Abu Ruqayyah Az-Zahabi

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Klasifikasi Hadis (Arab) - Imam Abu Ruqayyah Az-Zahabi

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