Hadith Notes

Anwar Shāh Kashmīrī called rigid principles “the blind man’s walking stick.” Digital tools offer us a better stick: they help the blind man walk, but can't give him eyes.

Do digital tools put modern hadith scholars ahead of nuqqād like al-Bukhārī? Easier access and better organization do not necessarily yield greater critical judgment. As al-Dhahabī observed, the early nuqqād saw narrators’ original notes and knew their 'ilal. Their judgments drew on familiarity with hadith transmitters and a corpus of reports that survives only partially today.

Mufti ʿAbd al-Mālik writes that the use of ḥasan as a technical hadith grading can be traced from Ibn al-Madīnī through al-Bukhārī to al-Tirmidhī.

I also like how he uses color to distinguish the transmitters’ regions, adding a geographical dimension to the visual representation of isnād routes.

Seyfeddin Kara makes a valuable observation here: much of the skepticism toward hadith in academic scholarship rests on generalizations drawn from a limited sample of reports.

Ignaz Goldziher, too, seems to have some fond memories of his time studying at al-Azhar in Egypt in the early months of 1874....

Consider a traditional scholar disputing whether an isnād transmitted by ʿanʿana should be treated as connected. He may lament the social consequences of abandoning faith, praise God in the course of his argument, and address his interlocutors with more exclamation marks than an academic editor would tolerate. None of this bears on the quality of his scholarship if he substantiates his claims with evidence, answers his critics point by point, and retracts factual errors when they are demonstrated. Piety is no more a disqualification from critical scholarship than secularity is a guarantee of it. No scholar approaches ideas with a worldview set entirely aside. Objectivity is better understood as an "asymptotic" than a "utopian" ideal: something toward which scholarship may continually approach without ever fully arriving. That no scholar attains perfect neutrality is no reason to abandon the pursuit of objectivity, still less to accuse some interlocutors of lacking it altogether.

This book addresses two audiences: scholars trained in the classical Islamic tradition and academics in Western Islamic studies. The familiar distinctions between them (insider and outsider, traditionalist and academic, religious and secular) can be useful for identifying differences in intellectual formation, starting assumptions, and potential blind spots. Too often, however, they harden into a contrast between critical and confessional scholarship, with modern academic work almost invariably assigned to the former and Muslim scholarship to the latter. The more consequential distinctions lie elsewhere: philological rigor, sound textual scholarship, command of the source languages, evidentiary discipline, and openness to modes of verification beyond the post-Enlightenment consensus. By these measures, the Muslim scholarly tradition and its historiographical achievements warrant far more serious engagement than they usually receive.

Over the last week, I've been editing my forthcoming introduction to the hadith tradition. One reviewer asked me to clarify my target audience, which got me thinking deeply about broader questions of "objectivity" and the traditional vs. academic divide. Here's a revised footnote from the preface:

I’ve always wondered whether someone spat in Schacht’s porridge the morning he decided to write The Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence. It would explain the mood - Ommud Dunya!

Memorizing scholars’ names, death dates, and regions was perhaps the best advice I received as a student of hadith. It helped me organize scattered information and make sense of how it all fit together. Every year, I share this list with my students to make the task more manageable: roughly 130 of the most frequently encountered hadith scholars up to the turn of the millennium. A few names a week, with regular revision, and you’ll soon know them like the back of your hand.

Imam Bukhārī discredits a hadith disparaging Muʿāwiya by comparing its contents with established historical facts. A good example of naqd al-matn (content criticism).